LG is gearing up to announce its next flagship smartphone at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, having previously released a mysterious "Goodbye Touch" teaser video. The firm has also since revealed a new cooling system that will be part of an upcoming 5G smartphone. Now, LG has made yet another announcement in preparation for MWC at the end of the month.
Officially disclosing the name of its upcoming flagship as the LG G8 ThinQ, keeping in line with last year"s top-tier smartphones from the company, LG also announced that it will introduce a time-of-flight front-facing camera on the device. The sensor is developed in partnership with Infineon Technologies, who will provide its REAL3 image sensor to power the experience.
Time-of-flight (ToF) cameras use infrared light that"s shot from the device and then measure the time it takes for the light to make its way back to the camera. This allows the image sensor to detect depth and distance, which will sound very similar to what Apple"s Face ID does. As such, you can naturally expect this to be used for biometric security on the LG G8 ThinQ, but it could potentially also be used to enable the bokeh effect on portrait shots, a commonplace feature in many smartphones.
This is an interesting choice for biometric security as more companies have been moving towards in-display fingerprint sensors. LG will be one of the few companies to provide 3D face scanning, especially in the Android space, so it could be a selling point for its flagship phone. We"ll know more about how well this works, as well as other aspects of the phone, when MWC comes around towards the end of February.
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