vivo may be famous in Malaysia for its selfie-centric smartphones, but at MWC Shanghai 2017, the company has demonstrated some pretty forward-thinking smartphone technologies. They may not yet be ready to be deployed on a smartphone yet, but they certainly will make its debut in the near future.

Vivo Under Display

A demo phone demonstrating vivo Under Display

The most interesting announcement made earlier is vivo Under Display, a new ultrasonic fingerprint scanning technology. Based on Qualcomm’s Fingerprint Sensors technology, vivo Under Display technology takes advantage of ultrasound waves to create a 3D map of the fingerprint. This technology captures far more information than standard capacitive-based fingerprint sensors in the market today.

More importantly, vivo Under Display’s ultrasonic fingerprint sensor is capable of scanning through OLED displays of up to 1.2mm thick, allowing it to be placed beneath the screen. This means there is no longer a need for a dedicated button for a fingerprint scanner, and the promise of a “true” bezel-less smartphone in a fully integrated unibody.

On top of that, vivo Under Display also improves waterproofing since there are fewer exposed parts on a smartphone. It is also usable underwater, with support for fingerprint gestures.

Vivo DSP Photography Solution

Apart from that, vivo has also introduced its very own digital signal processor for smartphone cameras. The new RK1608 dual-core DSP chip with 256MB integrated RAM is said to improve backlighting, low light photography, as well as selfie shots.

By increasing the photo processing speed by three times, multi-frame processing on a smartphone is now possible. The DSP allows a smartphone camera to take multiple RAW pictures, which will later be processed and composed into a single RAW image, and then exported to the JPG format.

For now, these technologies do not yet have a flagship vivo smartphone to demonstrate them, suggesting that they may not yet be ready for deployment. However, seeing that the company is already announcing these technologies, we may be seeing them in a flagship vivo smartphone very, very soon.