Apple’s TrueDepth camera kit that presaged the flood of notch-y phones in the first half of the year, is no regular face recognition effort, like the ones we had on Samsung flagships before the iPhone X was introduced.
It doesn’t simply use the front camera, coupled with an emitter at best, and applying software trickery for storing and reading your face afterward. In fact, the extra parts that make Face ID and Animoji on the iPhone X possible, are lovingly called Romeo and Juliet by Apple’s suppliers, as they have to be paired together for the system to work.
