- All right, so I'm here, I don't have my key fob on me,
my key card, the phone, none of that stuff,
the car is locked as you can see,
and as I walk up to it
and point my face at it.
Face ID for your Tesla, let's go.
(relaxed techno music)
So there are several different ways
that you can access your Tesla.
You have a key fob like this, a traditional one,
or a Tesla-traditional one.
You have a key card as kind of a backup,
and you have your phone, for the Model 3 anyways,
that acts as a Bluetooth phone key,
but all of these to me seemed a little dated,
a little unnecessary, and in sticking with Tesla's
first principle thinking, their way of kind of
breaking problems down to the most basic form,
I just had this thought of
why don't they just enable face ID?
They already have cameras all around it,
and facial recognition technology is pretty common
these days, so could we actually do this?
And it turns out, one of my good friends,
Adam Geitgey is the kind of world expert at this.
He has one of the most popular libraries for Python,
which is a programming language to help you
enable or execute facial recognition within your software,
within your programs.
So I hit him up and he helped me with this
and it was really just a few lines of code
and I'm not a great coder,
but I can kind of hack things together,
that's maybe my strong suit.
And so I took his code and after just a little bit of setup,
I was able to get it going with a regular webcam,
and it works pretty well, and you can see here
that what I've actually done is enable it to recognize me
and my face as you can see by the little box around it,
versus someone that is not me and is not my face.
If I get it closer, you can see that.
And so this is running in real time
and just constantly processing.
So the next part was when you recognized me
or in this case you if you had this enabled in your car,
to then send the unlock code to the vehicle.
And with Tesla, there is a public API.
An API is kind of like an interface,
it's a way for programs to talk to each other,
and since I'm a part of Teslab,
the company that is like your FitBit for your Tesla,
we had these controls built in.
So you can actually unlock your car from Teslab as well.
Just uses the exact same interface that the Tesla app uses.
So I contacted those developers and said
"hey, how could we do this, how hard is this?"
And it turns out, it's really simple.
So I was able to basically combine both
of these technologies, the facial recognition one
and the unlock API that Tesla uses to make this possible.
So here's how I set it up in the car
to work as you saw earlier.
So it's a really simple setup.
I have my laptop sitting here
running that facial recognition software
connected to a webcam on the other side of the car
pointed out to where when I stick my face at it,
it would do that recognition and then it would make the call
to unlock the car using the public API.
This is about 135 lines of code that does real-time
facial recognition, it's pretty crazy how simple
these things can be these days.
All right so I'm here, I don't have my key fob on me,
my key card, the phone, none of that stuff.
The car is locked as you can see,
and as I walk up to it,
and point my face at it,
face ID for your Tesla.
Now Tesla could do this.
It really wouldn't be that difficult
for the code that I wrote to be integrated
into their system, and they already have a system like this
called Tesla Sentry Mode, which is a security mode
that is running all eight cameras and sensors 24/7
or while it's enabled, and in case someone approaches
your car, it starts recording everything
and it tries to capture them.
Now there are some challenges here.
First off, processing all of those eight
and then unlocking the car would really drain the battery,
so instead of maybe one or two miles of drain
or maybe five miles even of drain overnight,
you'd be looking at losing one to two miles per hour,
so they would have to optimize this way beyond
what it currently is capable of doing.
A second challenge that they would have
with trying to implement what I did here
into their system is that a lot of these cameras
aren't pointed in a place that is obviously
going to catch the driver's face.
So they would have to use a different type of recognition.
Instead of facial recognition, they would have to use
something called a gait, and all that really is
is recognizing your body motion and who you are
based on how you walk and move through space,
which sounds a little crazy, but Google already does this
in Google Photos, where they can recognize who you are
without seeing your face, it's kind of crazy,
but one problem with that again is that it's less secure.
So as you saw me hold up a photo and it did that,
it recognized like that was a face,
this technology I demoed here is just that, it's a demo.
To actually catch kind of liveliness indicators,
like your iPhone might do with the depth sensor
would probably take some additional configurations
in the car or maybe some other more advanced systems
in order to actually securely detect that it's you
when you approach your vehicle.
So there's always more to the story,
as these technology things tend to show us.
You know, it seems like a simple,
hey why can't you just do that or why don't they just,
and then there's a lot more and there's good reason.
So I'm curious what you guys think.
Would this be something you would be
interested in Tesla implementing?
You know, I think again, the demo I showed
was pretty straightforward.
It only took me an afternoon to pull together,
but of course implementing it would be a lot more thought
and code that goes into it.
So let me know, let Tesla know if you think
this is something that they should do,
and maybe that'll be a good sign
that in the future we won't have to have any of these
extra things in our pockets when we approach our cars.
So thanks for watching and don't forget,
when you free the data, your mind will follow.
I'll see you guys back in the next one.
(relaxed techno music)
Thanks for watching the video.
Do you like data, maybe want to make your career
out of it, check out my free course at ftdacademy.com
and kickstart your data professional career today.
(relaxed techno music)