Hacker News Reader

Comment by raesene9 | Hacker News Reader

Windows Hello is pretty good for fixed or semi-fixed devices (e.g. Surfaces, Laptops, desktops) but really not great for mobile.

Hats/sunglasses/rain/lighting all cause problems for mobile devices and face recognition.

It'll be interesting to see if/how Apple overcome those problems

View on HN

Windows Hello was one of the first things I disabled on my surface. When I was working with someone, it annoyed the shit out of me to have to turn the laptop real quick to log back in, etc. Sometimes I just wanna activate it without looking, and it had to "wait" a couple seconds to realize I wasn't looking and wanted to just spend .3 microseconds to throw my PIN in.

Much easier to just 100% of the time splat out 4 numbers.

They worked with Hollywood mask makers. On the keynote they said it still knows you if you're wearing a scarf, sunglasses, grow a beard...

Touch ID: 1:50,000

Face ID: 1:1,000,000

Well everyone will need to wait for real-world tests to be sure, but I'd be quite surprised if they've got it good enough to work when someone is wearing a hat and sunglasses and yet still be secure enough to have a very low false-positive rate.

They generate a depth-map of the face with a pattern projector and IR-camera. Facial bone structure will be unaffected by superficial changes. I suspect things that obscure large portions of the face, like large glasses or a sudden thick beard will give it some difficulties.

That's what the marketing material says. I'd like to wait for some real world tests to determine if this works anywhere near as well as they say it does. My intuition says not, but I'd like to be surprised.

Those numbers don't mean shit if you don't say how you got to them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com