Virtual reality shoppers would be able to pay for things in future just by nodding their heads. A payment service that will allow this was unveiled and demonstrated by Alibaba Group Holdings’ finance arm on Wednesday.

A part of Alibaba’s efforts to capitalize on the latest technology in online shopping is this new technology that is being called VR Pay, the new payment system. For example, advertised as “pay with a selfie”, a facial recognition technology for Alipay mobile payments service was introduced by the company in 2015.

Without taking off the goggles, people using virtual reality goggles to browse virtual reality shopping malls will be able pay for their purchases. This is being allowed by the VR payment technology. To make a payment such shoppers would simply need to nod their heads or look instead to not make a purchase.

“It is very boring to have to take off your goggles for payment. With this, you will never need to take out your phone,” said Lin Feng, who is in charge of Ant Financial’s incubator F Lab that has been developing the payment service over the past few months.

Voice print technology that recognizes each person’s unique voice or account logins on connected devices are the means that would be used to verify user identity on VR Pay. Compared with other biometric recognition technologies, this was the most convenient method in a VR setting, Lin said.

He said that head movements, touch, or by staring at a point on virtual display for longer than 1.5 seconds can be the methods that can be used for entering passwords since passwords will still be needed for authentication.

By the end of this year, VR Pay is expected to be ready for commercial launch.

By connecting various VR goggle makers and app developers to the Alipay payments platform, Ant Financial’s new VR-based payment infrastructure can make VR “a tool rather than just a toy”, the firm said.

China’s largest online payments service Alipay with more than 450 million daily users is operated by Ant Financial Services Group, which was demonstrating VR Pay in Shenzhen on Wednesday.

EyeVerify, a maker of optical verification technology used by U.S. banks including Wells Fargo, was bought over by the company in September.

At the same time, with the $399 PlayStation VR, a headset the Japanese electronics group hopes will beat pricier rivals and revive its reputation as a maker of must-have gadgets, Sony Corp is also set to join the race for virtual reality (VR) dominance this week.

Rather than televisions or smartphones where demand is flat, competition acute and margins thin, Sony is reshaping itself to focus on lucrative areas such as video games, entertainment and camera sensors as the company emerges from years of restructuring. The single largest profit contributor for the group is now the games unit.

The company would be put back on the offensive and its ability to compete in one of the most talked-about spaces in the industry would be tested by the PlayStation VR headset, Sony’s first major product launch since it declared its turnaround complete in June.

(Adapted from Reuters)

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