Nano Colour Digital ID

By Innofocus Photonics Technology Pty Ltd

Innofocus developed a new security mechanism, which fundamentally differentiate our digital ID from any existing ones, including bar code, QR code, RFID, etc. It is empowered through the unique “Dual-Mechanism Security”. At the macroscopic level, the visual presentation and beautiful optical spectrum (Figure 1(a)) can be uniquely defined and read out by specialized devices; at the microscopic level, the information is encoded in nanostructures enabled by laser nanoprinting (Figure 1(b)). Such an ID can only be duplicated by simultaneously reproducing the spectrum and the nanostructure, which makes it impossible to be counterfeited due to the infinite number of possible designs and required advanced nanostructure manufacturing capability. The mechanism makes the ID-attached commodity anti-counterfeiting and extremely unique to ensure security and privacy. Our project solves the most critical security, usability and sustainability challenges of the current digital IDs by developing the world’s first colourful digital ID tag that can be directly engraved on products via laser nanofabrication without any additional attachment providing lifetime security protection. Conventional laser anti-counterfeiting labels are normally attachable stickers, which can be easily detached from commodities and get reproduced. More importantly, the information on a laser anti-counterfeiting label cannot be uniquely designed. Therefore, the identity information of a product cannot be encoded or decoded in the label. In comparison, Innofocus’ Nano Colour Digital ID is directly and permanently engraved into the products as beautiful decorations, which cannot be removed. Due to the flexibility of laser nanoprinting, by encoding the nanostructures, unique information of each product can be defined, which is particularly important for high value products, such as jewelleries, luxury watches, cars, antiques, medical devices, etc. Existing Digital ID designs are limited to a few fixed formats: black and white bar code or QR code printed on product packages to provide ID information. It has never been thought to be part of the product contributing to the product appearance and attractiveness. The Nano Colour Digital ID is the first of its kind, not only carrying vast amount of information (orders of magnitude more) with unprecedented security, but also forming a beautiful part of the product itself, making it more attractive, valuable and fashionable. The core concept of Nano Colour Digital ID is based on structural colour, beautiful colours enabled by properly designed and precisely fabricated nanostructures. Conventionally structural colours only exist in nature, for example butterfly wings or Australian opals. Man-made successes were limited at fully-equipped scientific laboratories. Real-life applications of structural colour has remained impossible due to the lack of powerful fabrication tools with extremely high resolution at nanometre scale, large throughput, and long-term stability. Such Nano Colour Digital IDs represent the next gen products, and their performance is overwhelmingly higher than the current digital IDs not only in terms of information capacity, level of security and environmental feature, but also their beautiful colour and patterns, which constitute unique and attractive features of products, making it a new fashion and adding extra value.