Prove you’re human on the Web by drawing shapes, not typing letters, with MotionCATPCHA

Recently, I was in a situation where Facebook asked me to enter some CAPTCHA code. I usually don’t have problems with it, but when I got asked to enter some characters that I don’t even have on my keyboard, I was stunned. How am I supposed to do that?

Thanks to the spam bots all over the world, today’s CAPTCHA codes are so much complicated that you can hardly read them. We, as a society, will soon need some new methods to identify as a human and not a programmed bot.

MotionCAPTCHA might be a great candidate for replacing the standard textual confirmations. The idea behind it is brilliant; you get a shape which you have to redraw. Shapes are simple, a triangle or a skewed line, basic doodles you would do on a piece of paper. The realisation is definitely great, because it doesn’t require from you to be pixel-perfect, you can make big mistakes, but as long as your mouse (or trackpad) movement looks like a shape in the picture – you’ll pass.

As Joss Crowcroft, the author of the project describes it, MotionCAPTCHA is a simple jQuery plugin based on HTML5 Canvas Harmony procedural drawing tool.

At the moment, MotionCAPTCHA is just a proof-of-concept, but the next releases will get some major enhancements and the ability to use it as a serious CAPTCHA alternative.

Take a look at this video demonstrating how MotionCAPTCHA works and try it out for yourself!

Also, read the story behind CAPTCHArt.