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Comment by rapnie | Hacker News Reader

"An Apple iPhone XR or newer is required for the 3D Face Scan. Bigscreen Beyond is manufactured based on this 3D Face Scan, and cannot be manufactured without it. If you do not own an iPhone, you can complete your 3D Face Scan by borrowing a friend's iPhone or using an iPhone at an Apple Store."

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A bit of an insane requirement honestly. I guess they're assuming their target demographic would be wealthy enough to either have an iPhone, or be around people who would have an iPhone? Kinda rubs me the wrong way still, even though I'd be able to get it done if I so choose...

They are using the FaceID depth sensors.

And right now the only phone with them and that has a usable API is apparently the iPhone.

This was covered in a walkthrough with a VR YouTuber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvih_ljVc_w

Is it insane if it's for a custom mold? Personally I would rather borrow a friend's phone than go into a physical store for a scan or have them send me a plaster mold kit.

It rubs me the wrong way this continued idea that only the wealthy have an iPhone, or atleast it does when people just assume that's the motive.

That may have been the case around 5+ years ago when flagship Samsung phones were significantly cheaper than iPhones. Then Samsung (for example) moved away from plastic screens and chassis to glass and aluminum, the prices went up.

Here in Australia the flagship iPhone 14 pro is from $1,899 with the flagship Samsung $1,949. With the Samsung fold at a whopping $2,499.

A normal Samsung S23 and iPhone 14 both go for the same price.

Of course we're just talking flagships, with both brands offering lower priced phones around that half price.

When you look at the mechanical design of most VR headsets, a lot of weight, space and effort is spent making the interpupillary distance adjustable. They made a deliberate choice here to manufacture chassis with fixed IPD, and to mold the front. It moves the weight and mechanical complexity out of the headset and into the ordering and manufacturing process.

I'm an Android user, but I get this requirement, because it actually gives you a better product.

Fortunately, I can borrow an iPhone from work

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

> 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.

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.

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