5 meters • Perfect lighting. Clear faces. Yet 30% of global workforce still misidentified. Building entrances become bottlenecks. $2.3M lost daily across Fortune 500 companies from authentication delays alone.

15 meters • Standard hallway distance. Accuracy drops 15-25%. Mining shift changes grind to halt. Each minute costs $50,000. Workers resort to tailgating, creating security breaches that kill 14.2 per 100,000 annually.

25 meters • Warehouse floor span. Recognition fails for 35% of workers. Forklifts idle. Production lines stop. Regulatory violations trigger $5.87M average fine. Insurance premiums spike 40% after incidents.

30 meters • Security camera standard. Physics wins. 45% accuracy gap emerges. Dark skin absorbs light. Algorithms see shadows. A $50B infrastructure investment rendered discriminatory by the laws of optics.

35 meters • The breaking point. Recognition becomes random. Every face a stranger. Security theater replaces security. The promise of AI-powered safety becomes systematic exclusion at industrial scale.