A team led by Rutgers University researchers at WINLAB led by Distinguished Professor Yingying Chen has developed a security system that could change how people log in to virtual and augmented reality platforms by eliminating passwords, personal identification numbers and eye scans and replacing them with something far more seamless. The system, a software program called VitalID, is based on the team’s discovery of a new biometric: tiny vibrations generated by breathing and heartbeats that resonate through the skull in patterns unique to each person’s bone structure and facial tissues. The work was presented in November in Taipei, Taiwan, at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, a major annual meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control, and was recognized with a Distinguished Paper Award. Extended reality, or XR, includes virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality technologies that blend digital content with the physical world. As XR systems expand beyond gaming into finance, medicine, education and remote work, security has become increasingly urgent. Further discussion of this work can be found in a recent New Jersey News 12 interview with Professor Chen.