It appears that Animoji doesn’t require Face ID to work

Nov 15, 2017 08:37 GMT  ·  By

Animoji appears to be one of the coolest features on the new iPhone X, and while at first availability seemed to be limited to the new device because of hardware requirements, it now looks like it was more of a marketing strategy.

An iPhone X review published by Marques Brownlee points to an interesting experiment on the iPhone X and which reveals something a little bit unexpected about Animoji.

As you can see in the video below at around 11:40, it looks like Animoji does not require Face ID to work, which means that the TrueDepth camera might have absolutely no role for this new feature. In other words, the front-facing camera of the iPhone X is the one in charge of making Animoji possible.

This means that pretty much any latest-generation iPhone should be capable of featuring Animoji, even if they lack the Face ID camera because this doesn’t seem to be required anyway. The YouTube test shows that Animoji works even when the Face ID sensors are covered, and the feature is disabled only when the RGB camera on the iPhone X – the one responsible for taking selfies and video calls – is blocked.

The role of Face ID cameras on Animoji

So does this mean that Apple is actually blocking Animoji on older iPhone models on purpose only to use this feature as an incentive to move more people to the iPhone X? This is indeed possible, and truth be told, it could be a pretty effective marketing strategy, but there are potentially other reasons for Animoji being limited to the iPhone X.

One such explanation concerns the role of the TrueDepth camera to enable Animoji. While Apple says very little about how it enables Animoji, there’s a chance that Face ID uses the TrueDepth sensors to map the face before turning to the RGB camera for the rest of the process. This would allow more detailed facial gestures, as well as a reduced impact on battery life when using Animoji.

For the time being, Apple remains completely tight-lipped on how Animoji works, but given the bad publicity the company is getting on this, a few more details would really come in handy.