Key facts
- Developer
- Apple Inc.
- Initial release
- November 3, 2017 ; 8 years ago ( 2017-11-03 )
- Operating system
- iPhone : iOS 11 or later iPad : iOS 12 or later
- Predecessor
- Touch ID
- Type
- Biometric authentication
- License
- Proprietary license
- Website
- support .apple .com /en-us /HT208108
via Wikipedia infobox
~16 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Face ID is a biometric authentication facial-recognition system designed and developed by Apple Inc. for the iPhone and iPad Pro. The system can be used for unlocking a device, making payments, accessing sensitive data, providing detailed facial expression tracking for Animoji, as well as six degrees of freedom (6DOF) head-tracking, eye-tracking, and other features. Initially released in November 2017 with the iPhone X, it has since been updated and introduced to all iPhones outside of SE models and all iPad Pro models from 2018 onwards. Users on iOS 18 and newer can choose to lock specific apps, requiring Face ID to access them.
The Face ID hardware uses a TrueDepth camera that consists of a sensor with three modules; a laser dot projector that projects a grid of small infrared dots onto a user's face, a module called the flood illuminator that shines infrared light at the face, and an infrared camera that takes an infrared picture of the user, reads the resulting pattern, and generates a 3D facial map.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Face ID” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.