3D images as a CAPTCHA
A CAPTCHA is a method of verifying whether the user of a web application is a human being, or a malicious computer program trying to post garbage data, ads, etc. onto a site. Some of the most common examples of CAPTCHAs are wavy lines overlaying some distorted images, such as this. You will often see them when you're registering for an account on a web-site, or just posting some information.
After reading an article on Slashdot on the CAPTCHA "industry" a few months ago, and learning that indeed computers are making headway into this text based method of human verification, I decided to take a crack at it and come up with my own solution.
After several attempts I came up with a very solid method of verifying humans are in fact humans and not machines. The method I came up with relies on producing 3D images for people to discern. For instance, if you see a picture of a rabbit as if you were looking down on it, and then looking at it as if you were looking at it from the side, your brain would still know you were looking at a rabbit.
While this may seem like an easy task, it's not. Over millions of years of evolution the part of the brain that deals with visualizing the world has become very sophisticated, at least in terms of computing power. For a computer to understand that a crumpled up pair of jeans on your bedroom floor is just a pair of jeans on the bedroom floor, and not some other piece of clothing, or even part of the pattern on the rug, is a feat no computer can currently do. Roboticists and other academics have been working feverishly for some time on this, not because it's intellectually interesting, but because it would advance robot self navigation (seeing) greatly. It's a very complex problem that humans do with ease. (for a more scientific explanation see: Wikipedia: Visual modularity)
Enter my design.
In the below illustration you will see that I have created a CAPTCHA interface that asks a user to verify that the top image matches one of the bottom images. A user can do this with ease, while a computer would be totally confounded by the randomly rotated view of the objects. And this is the crux of the design.
As of now, the CAPTCHA industry is busy, but not profitable. I looked into the idea of capitalizing on this idea, but in the end there really is not much money in the idea. The current leader in the CAPTCHA market is reCAPTCHA based out of Carnegie Mellon University. The have their CAPTCHA application hosted by the University for free, and the creators are paid academics, and so they charge nothing for their service. I was talking with their team via email, but when I proposed this idea, they went silent - presumably to limit liability if they wanted to use the concept. I'm still waiting for a return email, but no such luck.
So, I'm putting this design in the public domain. If you know of anyone who has 3D rendering software, and has access to web development resources, by all means, please forward this idea to them. It is now owned by humanity. I hope the idea comes to fruition soon - some CAPTCHAs are getting hard to read.
Taylor
