Elizabeth Stinson, Wired:

A COUPLE YEARS ago, Apple went on a shopping spree. It snatched up PrimeSense, maker of some of the best 3-D sensors on the market, as well Perceptio, Metaio, and Faceshift, companies that developed image recognition, augmented reality, and motion capture technology, respectively.

And:

Perhaps the most important feature in the new flagship phone is its face-tracking technology, which allows you to unlock the phone with your face or to lend your expressions to a dozen or so emoji with Animoji. Apple thinks the iPhone X represents the future of mobile tech, and for many, that’s true. But if you trace most of consumer technology’s most impressive accomplishments back to their origins, more often than not, it’ll lead you to a drab research lab full of graduate students. In the case of Animoji, that research happened to have taken place nearly a decade ago at a pair of Europe’s most prestigious technical schools.

And:

Algorithmic facial tracking is notoriously difficult pull off. Li calls the human face “one of the holy grails in computer graphics” because it’s so difficult to work on. Unlike a static object, the face is constantly deforming; there are no simple rules for a computer to follow.

This is a fascinating article. Animoji is not the goal, but rather a playful implementation that shows what is possible, how far Apple has come down this road.