CR80News was onsite at last month’s Transact360, the annual Transact Campus user group conference. Great speakers, great networking, and a packed technology exhibit hall highlighted the three day event. Here are a few of the highlights from the expo.

One of the most common campus implementations for biometric technology is in the dining hall, where quickly sending large numbers of students through a turnstile is vital. One university that seems particularly eager to deploy biometrics in this manner is Dartmouth University, where campus dining personnel are considering a future rollout.

The University of Texas at Austin is working with secure identity solutions provider, CLEAR, to deliver a fingerprint access system for fans attending events at Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium. The partnership will begin with University of Texas football games, and marks the first college athletic program to join CLEAR’s nationwide network.

Virginia Tech is the latest campus to install touchless biometric readers in its dining halls, deploying MorphoWave hand readers from IDEMIA. Virginia Tech is now the second university in as many weeks to announce its use of the MorphoWave product to enable student access to campus dining, following a release from St. Thomas University last week.

Minnesota’s St. Thomas University has installed touchless biometric hand scanners that students will now use to gain entry to campus dining halls instead of their ID cards. The initiative will leverage IDEMIA’s MorphoWave biometric readers, and will see all members of the campus community with meal plans be enrolled in the system.

HID Global’s Director of Business Development, Education Solutions, Brett St. Pierre provides a rundown of the company’s solution suite for the higher education vertical. In addition to newer solutions in the mobile identity and biometrics arenas, St. Pierre also discusses the company’s continuing focus on card technologies, and cites some of HID’s recent acquisitions and other investments around the card technology sector.

The Hyogo College of Medicine in Nishinomiya, Japan is using a facial-recognition biometric system to log student attendance in classrooms. As reported by The Japan Times, tablets are used to check student faces against pre-registered accounts in the biometric database, and is the first program of its kind in a Japanese university setting.