Apple is looking to roll-out a monumental upgrade to its best-selling timepiece, the Apple Watch. The next version of the smartwatch, which will presumably be branded Apple Watch Series 6, could boast Face ID facial recognition.
The iPhone manufacturer has applied for a patent that includes all of the sensors and cameras needed to unlock the device using your face.
Known as TrueDepth, the camera captures the shape and contours of your face by projecting over 30,000 invisible dots. It also captures an infrared image at the same time. All of this is to ensure the system cannot be tricked by a photo, or video of your face, or a lifelike Mission Impossible-style mask.
Face ID adapts to changes in your appearance, like wearing a new style of makeup or growing facial hair. If there is a more significant change in your appearance, like shaving a full beard, Face ID confirms your identity by using your passcode before it updates your face data. Face ID is designed to work with hats, scarves, glasses, contact lenses, and many sunglasses.
And it even works in total darkness – and doesn’t need to illuminate your face with a light to work.
According to Apple, Face ID is more secure than its predecessor – Touch ID, which uses fingerprint data to authenticate payments and unlock the device. The probability that a random person in the population could look at your iPhone or iPad Pro and unlock it using Face ID is approximately 1 in 1,000,000 with a single enrolled appearance, Apple states.
As it stands, Apple Watch uses a passcode to protect your data. However, you can allow your iPhone’s biometrics – Touch ID, or Face ID – to unlock the Apple Watch paired with the handset too, which saves you a bit of time. Having Face ID built into the smartwatch itself would make the smartwatch increasingly independent from the smartphone.
It would offer the same glance-and-it’s-securely-unlocked feature as the iPhone, but without having to cart around your iPhone. With the introduction of 4G capabilities, that means you could take your Apple Watch for a run, send and receive text messages, answer and make calls, and take-off your Watch and re-authenticate without having to laboriously type out the passcode again.
It would also bring Apple closer to supporting Android with its Apple Watch, since the smartwatch itself would have its own authentication system – it wouldn’t have to rely on anything built by the Android manufacturers. Given the recent security concerns around Android, this is something Apple would surely demand.
With its own App Store and the ability to install software without a smartphone – something that wasn’t possible before the launch of watchOS 6 back in September – Apple is increasingly cutting the umbilical cord between its best-selling smartphone and its best-selling accessory, the Apple Watch.
Unfortunately, the fact that Apple has patented this new design is no guarantee that we’ll see it appear on the next version of the wearable. After all, multi-national technology companies like Apple often patent designs and ideas that never make it out of the R&D lab.
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