One of the TechCrunch Disrupt hacks this year is the brainchild of Matthew Drake, an Atlanta-based employee of advertising firm 22squared. Secret Handshake, Drake’s hack this year, uses the Leap Motion gesture controller, combined with Clover’s shopping cart point-of-sale API, to allow people to pay using only a unique hand gesture or “secret handshake.”
That means you don’t have to have a phone with you, or a payment card or anything at all in fact. So long as a retailer has a POS system that can work with the Secret Handshake software and the Leap Motion controller, paying using only a user’s hand becomes possible. Handshakes involve simply a sequence of gestures, like extending two fingers followed by making a fist, for instance, which would approve the transaction and charge funds to an account previously associated with your Secret Handshake via an online dashboard.
Combined with facial recognition and other identifying data like name and phone number, this could be made even more secure, but the best part of it is that it reduces the reliance on tech for consumers thanks to clever use of inexpensive tech on the retailer’s side. Drake says Clover seems very interested in the system, so he could pursue it to build a more full-featured gesture-based payment system.