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Comment by Severian | Hacker News Reader

I was about to post this. Stupid requirement. Bigscreen needs to take the time and money to develop an Android or PC webcam solution.

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I assume they're making use of the depth sensors on the iPhone? Some Androids have those and some don't, so that's going to be a terrible requirements page, but it might make sense to add later if they survive; for PC webcams, I think almost none have a depth sensor, so that's probably not even worth doing.

Microsoft Hello compatible laptops are required to have some sort of IR depth sensor I think, though it's less precise and accurate than the iPhone one.

And apparently does not have a usable API for this face scanning use case.

> Bigscreen needs to take the time and money to develop an Android or PC webcam solution.

I don't really know if it's possible to get the accuracy out of a simple webcam that the IR blaster/FaceID hardware can get. Sure you can do facial comparisons to unlock the phone, but that doesn't give you as detailed geometry as the Face ID hardware does.

With a webcam, performance would unavoidably vary a lot between customers too due to the dizzyingly wide selection of webcams in use, all with differing performance characteristics. They'd have to contend with everything from USB webcams from 2002 up through the latest 4k webcams, not to mention image processing quirks those often come with like face smoothing.

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