If you think fingerprint access is forward-thinking and that chip implants are too future-thinking, then you need to make another cup of coffee and keep up with the times. Chip implants are a thing of the present. They are happening.

Epicenter, a new office block in Sweden, is offering under-skin chips for tenants and employees to gain access and use the photocopy machine (yay!). A tiny RFID (radio-frequency identification) chip is inserted between the thumb and forefinger et voila – access gained. Don’t panic – it’s about the size of a grain of rice and should fit in nicely near that major pressure point in your hand. Hopes for the future are that tenants will be able to pay for lunch in the cafe and will no longer wear lanyards around their necks (jokes, that last one is our hope).

The chipping process was fuelled by the Swedish Biohacking Group, who you can read more about HERE. They’re hoping to get more and more people chipped, before the likes of Google and Facebook start chipping us. Hannes Sjoblad heads up the project, and even has his business card stored on his chip. You can get his info by swiping your smartphone over the area.

“We already interact with technology all the time. Today it’s a bit messy – we need pin codes and passwords. Wouldn’t it be easy to just touch with your hand? That’s really intuitive.”

I think it’s going to take a lot of persuading to get this project going mainstream. There is no way I’d have anything inserted. I like the feeling of swiping cards and putting in codes.

[Source: The BBC]