thompr

Metriacanthosaurus said:

lorin schultz said:

Metriacanthosaurus said:

nhughes said:

Metriacanthosaurus said:

nhughes said:

Metriacanthosaurus said:

world class 3D imaging technology 2 years ahead of the closest runner up

How do you know this? 

Just stop. 

If this is the best you can do, you shouldn't be writing about Apple.

We can disagree, but if you want to insult me, you won't last much longer here on the forums.

No one is insulting you. But you are annoying me. By maintaining the idea that Face ID somehow has to be inferior to Touch ID, despite never seeing the product, because of (rather unimaginative) reservations of your part. You can be indifferent until you’ve seen the product, or you can give Apple the benefit of the doubt they’ve earned. 

I dont think it’s appropriate to take the angle you’ve maintained, especially with a wide audience. That is all.

I strongly disagree. I think it's responsible journalism to be skeptical and explore potential problems with alternative implementations. I don't mean being a FUD factory, but providing a realistic and honest examination of how a new feature or function may play out, including outcomes that aren't part of the positive spin provided by marketing materials. I realize that exploring potential downsides may be unpopular, especially on a site frequented by fans, but I think Neil did a good job of pointing out how likely/unlikely certain manifestations are, and separating what could happen from what he thinks will happen.

I often see or read about what seems like a great idea until someone points out a side-effect I didn't anticipate that makes me say, "Hm, I didn't think of that." That allows me to make better decisions. I may come to the conclusion that the intended purpose of the feature outweighs the liability of the side-effect, or I may choose to buy something else. The point is that it's still up to me to choose how I apply that information. Examining all possible outcomes, both positive and negative, is helpful.

And everyone knows that most of this is conjecture at this point, and may all ultimately be moot.

IF Apple is replacing Touch ID with Face ID, then Face ID is as good or better than Touch ID in every way that matters. Period. Why? Fucking because, that's why! You think Apple is going to replace their utterly world-class Touch ID technology with something inferior on their flagship years-in-development iPhone? This is so far beyond common sense that it is irritating to see anyone pretending to not understand this simple concept.

 I don't need to sit here and pretend to be skeptical with hypothetical problems and amateurish ideas of what 3D imaging/facial recognition is. Even calling it "facial recognition" is a misnomer and an attempt to demote it.

I think that one of Apple's nonnegotiable engineering objectives for this new iPhone was to maximize the fraction of the front face occupied by the display.  There was to be no physical home button, period.  As a consequence of that, as well as the fact that a fingerprint reader on the back is just plain stupid, Apple tried their darnedest to get the TouchID to work within the display.  Having FaceID was an objective too, but I suspect Apple would have preferred to have both that & TouchID for some time.  But TouchID in the display didn't work well enough, and ditching the home button was nonnegotiable.  Ergo, TouchID had to go.  And that was possible only because FaceID apparently meets whatever requirements Apple set for probability of detect & false alarm rates.  That's all great, and I like it.  They probably also considered the inevitable impact to certain use cases and did something (we shall see) to mitigate those to the extent they could.  ApplePay may be one of those things that requires an extra step or two.  We shall see how they handle that.

In other words, I could see how Apple's engineering trade-off logic may have come down to this:  having a full screen display plus FaceID is more desirable than keeping the physical home button, moving the TouchID to the back, or shipping a TouchID in display that does not work well enough.  This does not imply that (FaceID >= TouchID).  It only implies that (Fullscreen + FaceID)  > (Smaller Screen + Home Button with TouchID) and that FaceID is "good enough", not to mention probably "very cool".  Actually, I think the latter operator should be >>, because I really think the left side of that inequality is going to absolutely rock.

I don't think you should let yourself get so annoyed by people having thoughtful discourse like this, and certainly not just "fucking because".  Perhaps you should slow down and give your forum-mates a little more credit.  Your initial response about the scanning of a flat document at a high angle couldn't be further from the point that at least two of us were making, and that was only because you were in a huge hurry to dismiss anything we said.

ipedro said:

thompr said:

ipedro said:

nht said:

ipedro said:

nhughes said:

jwdawso said:

Any thoughts on the alleged longer power button? Wouldn't surprise me if it doubled as a home button. 

There was some speculation that perhaps Apple would embed Touch ID into the power/lock button, but no rumors or leaks have suggested that will be the case. Doubling as a home button would be problematic — how would you lock the device, or differentiate between locking and returning to the home screen?

A single side button can be designed to perform many different tasks, including equally important tasks like a home and lock/sleep. Think of a camera’s shutter button. 2 levels of pressure. Press to focus, press all the way to shoot. Translated to an iPhone: press to go Home (click!), press further in to sleep/awake (deeper click). 

The fact that the side button has been consistently rumoured to be more prominent, reflects the new importance of this button. This larger side button could also include Touch ID if Apple decides that its removal impacts too many people i.e. those who wear masks/helmets/face protection for work or leisure and can’t use Face ID. My bet is on Touch ID being gone entirely and replaced by Face ID despite the limitations I mentioned. Touch ID doesn’t work with gloves and people have lived with that limitation just fine. 

On a side note, it always strikes me how some people here can’t think outside of the box. I don’t mean this as an insult. It’s just mind blowing to me. Just because something can’t be done with today’s paradigm, doesn’t mean that that paradigm can’t be changed to solve a new problem. Just because a button is known to have 2 states — pressed or not pressed — it doesn’t mean that a different type of button with multiple states can’t be designed. 

Hold your phone while using the thumb for swiping.  Can you reach the power button (even if longer) where it is currently positioned?  No.

Put the single side button lower where a finger can comfortably use it as home...great right?  

Now switch hands.

Thinking outside the box is great but human hands behave a certain way which is why some things end up the way they are.

The current home button has multi-states.  Do a light double tap and you end up lowering the screen with Reachabiity.  Double click the home button and you get the app selector.  Do a long press and get Siri.  Do a short press and you go home. Single light tap is unused because of too many false positives.

The current power button also has multiple states.  Short press = screen off.  Long press = shutdown screen.

I dunno...all the so-called "pro" users in this thread seems unaware that all the single gesture options are already being used by the iOS UI as are most of the home button interactions.

In the home screen  UI: 

Down swipe gets you search.
Up swipe gets you the control buttons
Left swipe is navigation or the notification screen
Right swipe is navigation

Plus apps will have their own swipe behaviors...so you can't just say "Oh, we'll just use double up swipe to go home" because any game that uses swipe for game play control will constantly have that swipe behavior.

Oh, I use face ID to unlock my Surface Book.  I MUCH prefer the Touch ID on my MBP.

Correction: you have never used Face ID (Apple’s version). None of us has. 

There were other applications of finger print unlocking before Touch ID. They were unreliable, slow and required swiping your finger slowly over the sensor. Totally unusable. Along came Touch ID and made it fast, accurate and intuitive — you just put your finger on the button you were already using to wake up your iPhone. 

Apple has earned a reputation for waiting until they’ve perfected a technology so that they can release it, not first but right. Face ID will be unobtrusive, seamless and accurate and it’ll make everybody forget Touch ID. 

If FaceID constrains us to distance & angle of face relative to the sensors then that might end up being a little obtrusive for some use cases.

I mention AR kit because it’s able to recognize objects at angles. If you have iOS 11 beta, check out document scanning in Notes. You can precisely and accurately scan a document on close to a flat plain. Somewhere close to 180 degrees. It really is mind blowing. And I’m doing this on an iPhone 6 Plus, a 3 year old phone. Imagine what can be done with cutting edge 3D sensors and lasers, built specifically to detect and scan faces. And you don’t need anywhere close to 180 degrees to scan a face while an iPhone is sitting on the desk nearby. 

With Face ID, if you can see your phone, your phone can see you. There won’t be any raising your phone to your face to unlock it. If you’re near your phone, it’s unlocked. That simple. 

Now, imagine how something like that can be far superior to Touch ID. Scanning your fingerprint works by request or by deliberate action. Face ID can check on you whenever is necessary to secure your phone to make sure you’re the one using it, not someone who walked off with it after you unlocked it with Touch ID. Whenever you’re using your phone, it’s unlocked. Whenever someone else is using it, it’s locked. 

Scanning a flat document that is tilted at an extreme angle is not hard.  It's called an "affine transformation", and it can be done without any 3D sensors at all.

A harder problem is associated with transforming or "warping", as it's sometimes called, an undulating surface (such as a face) that is turned at an arbitrary angle.  3D sensors are definitely necessary here, as are good models of your face to begin with.  And I'm sure that Apple has solve both of these.

But neither of those things illustrate my concern.  The problem I'm talking about here is the one where your face is not directly in the field of view of the sensors.  Think about a case where the phone is lying nearly flat & level on an NFC sensor at a retail store, and you are standing such that your face is two feet away and 45 degrees off axis from the vertical sensor "bore site".  The question I have is this: how broad is the transmit & receive field of the 3D sensor(s)?  Are they looking isotropically from the face of the phone?  Are they literally scanning almost half-hemisphere above and hunting for your face at any distance?  There must be some limits.

In other words, I'm not necessarily believing your statement:  "With Face ID, if you can see your phone, your phone can see you."

ipedro said:

nht said:

ipedro said:

nhughes said:

jwdawso said:

Any thoughts on the alleged longer power button? Wouldn't surprise me if it doubled as a home button. 

There was some speculation that perhaps Apple would embed Touch ID into the power/lock button, but no rumors or leaks have suggested that will be the case. Doubling as a home button would be problematic — how would you lock the device, or differentiate between locking and returning to the home screen?

A single side button can be designed to perform many different tasks, including equally important tasks like a home and lock/sleep. Think of a camera’s shutter button. 2 levels of pressure. Press to focus, press all the way to shoot. Translated to an iPhone: press to go Home (click!), press further in to sleep/awake (deeper click). 

The fact that the side button has been consistently rumoured to be more prominent, reflects the new importance of this button. This larger side button could also include Touch ID if Apple decides that its removal impacts too many people i.e. those who wear masks/helmets/face protection for work or leisure and can’t use Face ID. My bet is on Touch ID being gone entirely and replaced by Face ID despite the limitations I mentioned. Touch ID doesn’t work with gloves and people have lived with that limitation just fine. 

On a side note, it always strikes me how some people here can’t think outside of the box. I don’t mean this as an insult. It’s just mind blowing to me. Just because something can’t be done with today’s paradigm, doesn’t mean that that paradigm can’t be changed to solve a new problem. Just because a button is known to have 2 states — pressed or not pressed — it doesn’t mean that a different type of button with multiple states can’t be designed. 

Hold your phone while using the thumb for swiping.  Can you reach the power button (even if longer) where it is currently positioned?  No.

Put the single side button lower where a finger can comfortably use it as home...great right?  

Now switch hands.

Thinking outside the box is great but human hands behave a certain way which is why some things end up the way they are.

The current home button has multi-states.  Do a light double tap and you end up lowering the screen with Reachabiity.  Double click the home button and you get the app selector.  Do a long press and get Siri.  Do a short press and you go home. Single light tap is unused because of too many false positives.

The current power button also has multiple states.  Short press = screen off.  Long press = shutdown screen.

I dunno...all the so-called "pro" users in this thread seems unaware that all the single gesture options are already being used by the iOS UI as are most of the home button interactions.

In the home screen  UI: 

Down swipe gets you search.
Up swipe gets you the control buttons
Left swipe is navigation or the notification screen
Right swipe is navigation

Plus apps will have their own swipe behaviors...so you can't just say "Oh, we'll just use double up swipe to go home" because any game that uses swipe for game play control will constantly have that swipe behavior.

Oh, I use face ID to unlock my Surface Book.  I MUCH prefer the Touch ID on my MBP.

Correction: you have never used Face ID (Apple’s version). None of us has. 

There were other applications of finger print unlocking before Touch ID. They were unreliable, slow and required swiping your finger slowly over the sensor. Totally unusable. Along came Touch ID and made it fast, accurate and intuitive — you just put your finger on the button you were already using to wake up your iPhone. 

Apple has earned a reputation for waiting until they’ve perfected a technology so that they can release it, not first but right. Face ID will be unobtrusive, seamless and accurate and it’ll make everybody forget Touch ID. 

If FaceID constrains us to distance & angle of face relative to the sensors then that might end up being a little obtrusive for some use cases.

Soli said:

mubaili said:

when would Apple send out the event invitation? 

Historically, this week by Friday. However, nothing is certain.

Additionally, if they're hosting it at Steve Jobs Theater and the venue only holds 1000(?) attendees they may want to keep it more of a secret longer or feel they need less additional time to let attendees know. I think the counter to that is the the lead time being static regardless of where Apple holds the event, assuming that there are attendees that will need to fly in.

Another reason for a delay could be Apple is unsure when the theater will be ready or when the iPhone will be ready to go on sale so they have ultimate control of when they wish to populate the theater without having to plan far ahead by renting a venue.

Oh, I would think that the date and venue have been settled for quite some time now, even if - and it's a big if - the Steve Jobs theater is ready to go.

Metriacanthosaurus said:

eightzero said:

No mention of the value of TouchID to applePay though.

Because this isn't a thing. ApplePay has nothing to do with Touch ID. Apple's security mechanisms are why Apple Pay is acceptable to the industry. Touch ID is a convenience feature, that lets you skip entering a password. It has nothing to do with the overall security protocols in place. For this reason, Touch ID is interchangeable with any equally high quality convenience feature that Apple develops.

And within the last sentence lies the rub.  The system developed needs to be equally convenient when used with ApplePay, and that may not turn out to be the case.

Do you use ApplePay at retail checkout counters?  When you place the phone near the NFC system, the iPhone switches to ApplePay mode instantly, regardless of what app it was in or even if it was previously asleep.  At that moment, the phone needs to confirm that YOU are the one holding it while it is still very near the NFC system so it can complete the confirmation of payment.  The current mechanism, i.e. relying on TouchID, is perfectly convenient because your thumb is right there to do the trick.

Contrast that with any other system of ID confirmation, whether it be entering a PIN, scanning your face, or even scanning your retina (not that that is even in the cards right now, but just for the sake of argument).  Given the position and angle that these readers are at relative to your face (often a couple of feet away and at an obtuse angle with respect to your face) I wonder how well the face scanning will work from that position.  How broad of an angle in space will the 3D sensors cover (so your face is even in its view), how near does your face need to be (to give it enough "voxels on target"), and how well will it work if your face is not nearly perpendicular to the beam pattern (how complete is your stored 3-D "face model")?  It's entirely possible that Apple will have to design in a few extra steps, such as either:

(1) after ApplePay is invoked, requiring you to tilt and/or lift your phone a bit to scan your face (or type in a PIN) and then place it back down again, which NFC systems may not even support, or...

(2) scan your face (or enter PIN) first mere seconds before placing the phone down on the NFC system.  (Of course, this would require the iPhone to be awake and make you launch ApplePay prior to placing the phone.) 

Note: a third option is that the user has to bend over to get his/her face near and directly over the phone while it is still near the reader.  I think this will cause some consternation for many users.  Maybe not for geeks such as me and many AI readers here, but I can imagine that a non-trivial fraction of users won't want to contort like this in public.

Just two seconds of thought on this and you realize that from a user experience perspective, the current TouchID implementation holds a lot of value for ApplePay.  Any other "high quality convenience feature that Apple develops" to support this ID verification is going to have to be designed with these things in mind, and I (for one) am somewhat concerned that it won't be as good for this use case as TouchID is.  Maybe this is a first-world problem, and maybe you will scoff at me for my concern over a few extra steps, but my observation is that Apple commonly designs for solving first-world problems.  The original implementation of ApplePay with TouchID clearly indicates they worked hard to do just that.  Here's hoping whatever they come up with regarding ApplePay and ID verification (non TouchID) is just as slick.

P.S. I have similar concerns with unlocking the phone any time it is laying on a level surface and my face is not directly above the phone.  Yes, I sometimes do that to see what is onscreen (such as a score, stock price, or whatever page/app I left it on) without having to pick the device up.