While I love Shenzhen's attitude to intellectual property, this is not a solution outside hobby market. I doubt people will dare to release a product in clear violation of Apple's patents (or whoever owns them now).

My expectation is that the no-name hobbyist products (with no clear company to sue) will come first, people will buy them, and then major manufacturers will see them and want to get the hardware into their own products too, at which point they'll probably get interested in licensing Apple's patents. Which means the resulting branded products won't cost $3, but they won't be $1000 either.

I don't expect Apple would willingly license their patent to their competitors in the mobile space (who, after all, would just want to slap a FaceID-equivalent feature into their own phones); but they'd probably be interested in licensing it to e.g. electronic door-lock companies, or action-camera companies (add a "depth" track to your video), etc.

My guess is that rather than the Kinect, what people will probably be buying 2-5 years from now for "commercially scalable" projects is an LG USB webcam that has Apple's miniaturized sensors embedded, and is using the (by-then-standardized) no-name Shenzhen remake of Apple's face-recognition ML-accelerator core.

It is being disputed by Apple, but Bloomberg claims that "$3 part" is what is keeping iPhone X output low.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-iphone/apple-disput...

Not really even close. While two cameras is nice, is definitely not the same as the structured light approach in the Kinect.

FYI, front camera in X uses structural light, while Kinect 2 uses a more modern time-of-flight (ToF) technology, which delivers better depth resolution.

From https://www.apple.com/iphone-x/:

"Face ID is enabled by the TrueDepth camera and is simple to set up. It projects and analyzes more than 30,000 invisible dots to create a precise depth map of your face."

Note that the depth resolution they are desscribing is 160x160=30,000, which is really standard structured light. Put a 1Mpix camera behind it and you can interpolate ~6 pixels in between to estimate depth/slope.

The iPhone X uses a real depth-sensing system, based on structured light tech from the Kinect, for FaceID.