As a Registration staffer, I'd like to be able to enter personal information into the system by scanning a photo ID, so I can check in attendees faster

[DarkKilauea]

Automate entry of personal information by support for ID scanning.

Research is needed into how to achieve this or if it is feasible to do.

[SkylerRingtail]

Cursory Google search shows a variety of third-party products and APIs for this sort of thing (some pretty pricey at say $500 per unit). However, I imagine some number of attendees will object to this sort of scanning on privacy grounds (even if we're not saving information).

[jmdawson]

This is a good place to survey MAGFest on what they have explored in this direction.

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On Jul 29, 2019, at 20:20, SkylerRingtail ***@***.***> wrote: Cursory Google search shows a variety of third-party products and APIs for this sort of thing (some pretty pricey at say $500 per unit). However, I imagine some number of attendees will object to this sort of scanning on privacy grounds (even if we're not saving information). — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

[kitsuta]

We've done some cursory investigation, yea. If you want to just capture recent-ish US driver's licenses, those have a standardized PDF417 barcode on the back, so you theoretically just need a 2D barcode scanner and a PDF417 third-party library.

If you want to capture... well, just about anything else, the hardware cost seems to rocket up pretty fast. We've never done either partly because admins and staffers are almost never inputting personal information themselves, so it only makes sense as part of self-service check-in, which itself is something we're only working on very, very slowly.

[SkylerRingtail]

To your later point on staffers almost never entering personal info, staffers do have to search for an attendee's name to check them in. If a system like this could be adapted to that purpose, it would help speed things up. Honestly though, this kind of OCR seems best suited to at-the-door reg, and the barcode system mentioned in #311 best for speeding up the pre-reg check-in process.

[kitsuta]

Yea, if you're scanning anything to find a registration, the check-in barcode is a far better choice as it will give you exact right registration no matter how common the attendee's name is. In fact, that's actually why we implemented check-in barcodes but not reading driver's license barcodes.

[jmdawson]

@fursuit69 Is this a thing we have the scanners for already? Does your workflow incorporate this? Etc etc.