Even twins can't fool Windows 10's facial recognition!

One of the myriad benefits of Microsoft's new Windows 10 operating systems is the ability to sign in with just your face via a system called Windows Hello. And now we know, thanks to The Australian, that similar-looking faces even twins can't fool the system's bio-metric security.

In a not-entirely-scientific test, the online news organization enlisted the help of The Australian Twins Registry to find some losely matched twin pairs and then put them in front of Windows 10 machines.

Windows 10 cannot, by itself, identify faces. You must have a computer equipped with Intel's RealSense 3D camera technology, which is actually three image technologies: a conventional camera, an infrared camera, and an infrared laser projector. The combination of the three, Intel claims, lets the computer see the world more like humans do. As for how well it can identify faces, earlier this year Microsoft claimed a 1-in-100,000 false accept rate.

For its experiment, The Australian worked with six sets of identical twins. In each pair, only one twin would register his or her face with a Windows 10 system equipped with RealSense. The next step was seeing if the unregistered twin could use his or her face to register on their sibling's account.

How did Windows 10 do? It passed.

"It could distinguish between us two quite easily," one of the twins, Miriam Jeffrey, told The Australian. "It’s a little surprising, I thought it would have failed, but no, it was really good, it was really quick."

It's an encouraging result and takes the notion of trying to defeat image-based sign-in systems with photographs an important step further. We knew Windows 10 Hello and RealSense would look for living faces but didn't know until now how smart it could be about people who look very much alike but are still not the same.

Even so, few computers have access to this biometric security technology. Perhaps this result will encourage more manufacturers to adopt Intel's RealSense image system and more consumers to adopt Windows 10. Just think, a computer that remembers your face (and your face alone) so you don’t have to remember a password.