I blogged last year about the introduction of an immigration 'fast lane' at Heathrow airport, based on iris pattern recognition. I noted at the time that scalability and throughput of the system would be a key factor, and have had a few opportunities since then to observe it in practice.
I wish I could show you some photos or a movie clip of what was happening on Friday night, for instance, but as cameras are forbidden in the immigration area I'll have to stick with words. Frankly, the 'customer experience' sucked. Here were some of the factors in play:
- there were queues at both the IRIS channel and the 'human being' channel;
- there was one IRIS machine (Heathrow Terminal 4) and 4 immigration officers;
- the queue for the IRIS machine was about 10-12 people;
- it's hard to judge, but I would estimate that the queue for the 'human being' channel was about 150.
Despite appearances, the 'human being' channel was, hands down, the one to join. Here are some of the problems with the system:
1 - the basic fact is that on average, the immmigration officers always work much faster than the IRIS machine (and there are more of them at every terminal);
2 - the IRIS machine was 'rejecting' about one in 4 people - as far as I could tell, usually because of 'user error'. The machine works by asking you to look into one of three cameras mounted in a vertical row, but the ergonomics are not good, and it's easy to get confused about which camera you're supposed to be looking at;
3 - rejection follows multiple attempts and therefore takes even longer than a successful verification;
4 - if you're rejected, there is no 'error handling' option... you just have to come out, cross over to the 'human being' channel and join the back of the queue. NB - from memory, I don't think that is the case at Terminal 1, where I think there's a 'fallback' immigration officer by the IRIS channel to mop up the rejects; can't remember about Terminal 2.
5 - The immigration officers' supervisor did emerge from her glass box at one stage, but was extremely unhelpful when asked if the 'rejects' could be handled by a human being and thereby speed up the whole process. Her response was simply "you have the choice of which queue to join in the first place". By the time the complainant in question had finally made it through the gate, the supervisor had retreated to her lair once again.
So whatever the merits or otherwise of the technology, this is currently a system which is set up to fail simply because of the way it is being operated. The throughput is worse than the non-technical alternative, there's no provision for scalability, and there's no failover.
B-, could do better.
![[RSS Newsfeed]](/themes/sotto/images/valid-rss.png)
![[This is a Roller site]](/themes/sotto/images/roller-logo.gif){kind=logo}