Samsung to feature iris scanners on its mobile devices – and it's sooner than you may think!

SRI (Stanford Research Institute) International is a nonprofit research institute and one of the largest ones in the world at that. Established in 1946, it is based in the US and is said to have brought regional economic development as well as many innovations to various scientific fields (from medicine to tech) through the years.

Why do we talk about it, you may ask. Well, SRI has developed a range of biometric systems it calls Iris on the Move (IOM) and, as the name suggests, they work as portable iris scanning gizmos. Today, the company has announced it has given Samsung an exclusive license to the tech to use in mobile products, and the report claims we may see the first device to come from this alliance fairly soon!

According to the press release, the very first Sammy product to feature the iris scanning tech is a modified Samsung Galaxy Tab PRO 8.4. The gizmo will be showcased at this year's ISC West in Las Vegas, on April the 17th and will, in fact, be sold worldwide through "SRI partners and resellers ". We'd imagine it would be a limited edition test device for businesses, but hey – who knows.

Now, it seems that the IOM tech in Sammy's tablet is to be used as an identity authentication tool to be used by regulation personnel, rather than a device lock/unlock mechanism. However, it could be a step towards replacing the fingerprint sensor with a much more accurate, and harder to cheat, iris scanner. After all, it has been rumored that Samsung is looking into the technology before, though, back then, the company had to give up on its plans due to issues with practical implementation of the tech.