Nanotech's Award-Winning Nano-Optic Toolkit

Canadian company Nanotech has been causing quite a stir in recent months with a succession of successful authentication programmes using its toolkit of nano-optic based visual effects. The Holography Conference Online 2021 (THCO 17 – 18 November) provided the perfect opportunity for Neal Skura, Director of Product Management to open the toolkit and take a look inside.

Neal’s starting premise in his paper titled ‘Combating Counterfeits with a Toolkit of Authentication Effects’ was that anti-counterfeit technologies continue to be important as the economic, health and safety impacts of fake goods continues to rise. Neal shared a startling statistic that one in three consumers will have purchased fake goods – either knowingly or otherwise. To be effective in curbing this trend, overt optical security must be both easy to authenticate and difficult to simulate.

Neal picked up on the ‘poor relation’ theme that is often applied to the introduction of visual deterrent technologies that start as devices on banknotes and that over time trickle down to the brand protection industry. To some extent, holography has been a victim of its own success in this regard, in that it has become so popular as a first level feature on banknotes across the world that it has lost some of its visual impact in the brand protection arena.