Face, face, face! Apple, TrueDepth and a nose-driven iPhone X game On the November 3, 2017, Brad Dwyer set to work unearthing the mysteries of Apple’s released-that-day iPhone X and its strange new TrueDepth camera. The engineer and entrepreneur wanted to create an app to leverage that new forward-facing face-scanning camera - to build one of the in a first generation of "face-driven games - …
If the face unlocking were actually functionally superior to a fingerprint reader in any way, to justify the price:
-Faster
-More reliable
-More secure
You might have a point, but it is none of those.
At the moment you have an expensive new bit of hardware that implements an existing function in a slightly worse way.
Apart from that it is an interesting bit of technology, which might be used to do something useful and innovative in the future, but so far we have only got animated emojis and a nose-pointing game.
On the other hand, I suppose the rest of us should be grateful that the zealots are more willing than XBox owners to pay so much to bankroll a speculative R&D project.
The article mentions Kinect several times, but despite noting that it was a very interesting (and quite useful in certain niches) idea that failed commercially due to the lack of any common use, this doesn't seem to be applied to the iPhone system - what actual use is there for a Kinect on your phone? As mentioned, Kinect was able to produce all kinds of interesting videos of cool things it could do; the best TrueDepth can manage is to tell you which way your nose is pointing. We already have commercially available systems that allow, for example, disabled people to control computers just with their eyes. How is measuring the orientation of an entire face supposed to be more interesting or useful than that? It's a worse, albeit more portable, Kinect that doesn't actually do anything new or useful. It's obviously well optimised for facial recognition, if you happen to like that sort of thing, but this nose direction demo really doesn't suggest that there will be thousands of amazing new uses for it coming along any time soon.
It could be using the device's photostream to help spot faces in all the noise - a spot of machine learning prior to it working smoothly. Now, if that's the case, it does depend on what's in the photostream...
Let's hope it can tell if the owner is using it, as opposed to, say, the owner's dog sniffing at a picture-ad of dog biscuits that just popped up. There could be another Burger King or doll's house story involving Amazon orders for huge quantities of Bonio treats arriving at iPhone X owners' homes...
Kinect was premised on two very shaky assumptions.
1. That people wanted a glorified EyeToy.
2. That games that use motion controls are desirable and more fun that those played with regular controls.
Neither assumption was correct. The EyeToy sold well as a peripheral but it didn't exactly set the world on fire. And motion controlled games tend to be terrible, limited to things like dance / fitness and dumb mini games.
On top of that, Microsoft overpromised, pretending the system could recognize faces, track skeletons, even track individual fingers even of up to 4 people. Some demos like "Milo" merely suggested the system even had speech recognition, natural language processing and could recognize expressions and mood.
Then when it was eventually crapped out it could barely recognize somebody flailing their arms around or pretending to be holding a steering wheel.
Undaunted, Microsoft shoved an updated version into the XBox One, whether people wanted it or not and nearly killed their new console stone dead.
So yeah.
I don't see the tech being much use in the iPhone X either. It's there to justify the high price, not because it offers some substantial benefit. I suppose it's great you can unlock a phone by looking at the phone (cheaper phones have a similar feature), but the security is terrible and most people would still prefer to use a fingerprint or pin.
Kinect was premised on two very shaky assumptions.
1. That people wanted a glorified EyeToy.
2. That games that use motion controls are desirable and more fun that those played with regular controls.
We hosted a game at our museum where the player could "fly" Superted collecting points and powerups and defeating enemies. It used a PC-version Kinect which annoyingly didn't include the motorised tilt function present in the XBox version.
The game was extremely sensitive to player position and attitude at start, often needed "re calibrating" and would be thrown by someone walking past behind the player (so we installed a wall).
All that aside, visitors loved the thing and there were often queues to use it.
M.
"Would apps be able to sneak a look at your face and read your emotions?"
Years ago I went to a computer architecture conference where in a set of papers on power saving for PCs someone was proposing using feedback from the users responses to allow a PC to minimize power consumption by reducing clock speed until it detected the user was becoming unhappy with the performance. So, how long till we find Apple have added the "software update" that ensures old iPhones run just below the "happy with my phones performance" level to encourage the next upgrade :-)
Sigh. The El Reg resident sub-ed/DJ again with the primeval song references totally lost on proto-millennials -
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Diamond ]
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monkees ]
- but a resonant and entertaining distraction for those still breathing.
"Why do we bother, Fawlty?" ... "Didn't know you did, Major."
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