Ever since the iPhone X was unveiled, Apple’s Animoji have been lauded as the greatest innovation to grace smartphones since multi-touch. So advanced, in fact, that Apple had to create a fancy new sensor just to map your mug to a poop emoji.

Sarcasm aside, it turns out Animoji doesn’t always need Face ID to work.

Marques Brownlee, tech YouTuber extraordinaire, made the point in his iPhone X review. Animoji work fine even if you cover up all of Face ID’s TrueDepth sensors, and only stop working if you cover the regular RGB camera.

In other words, it doesn’t seem there’s a clear reason Animoji can’t work on the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus. Was Apple lying to us this whole time?

Well, no, not quite. Animoji use ARKit and – as seen above – the single front camera can at least temporarily suffice for face-tracking shenanigans. However, Apple currently doesn’t allow ARKit to work on the front camera for any iPhone other than the iPhone X.

Update: We tested it on a couple of iPhone X’s, and it seems my earlier theory was actually correct. While there’s little or no difference when you cover up Face ID’s sensors after Animoji have already begun, if you cover the TrueDepth sensors beforeyou initiate the process, the resulting animoji are more laggy and stuttery than usual. That suggests Apple is using Face ID’s sensors to create an initial depth map – possibly refreshed periodically – which is then mapped onto the RGB camera.

Again, I’m still not convinced Apple absolutely needs TrueDepth for Animoji to be effective. After all, the Pixel 2 and Mate 10 can create realistic depth maps without special hardware for portrait mode on their selfie cameras, and masks works well on other apps not using fancy depth sensors. I’m sure plenty of iPhone 8 users would have been just fine with Animoji made using the RGB camera.

But maybe the Apple didn’t want to settle for ‘just fine.’ In any case, it’s clear the company is using TrueDepth on the iPhone X for at least some additional accuracy, and chances are it will only use it more as features and refinements are added in the future.

Source: thenextweb