Has everyone forgotten that a new "face authentication framework" has been publicly in AOSP for 6 months now?
Here's a few key points.
"Add face authentication capability to TrustManager and Keyguard"
What's Keyguard? Oh, that's whatever it is that you use to bypass your lockscreen. Examples, a pattern, password, pin, swipe, fingerprint or your face.
"Unlike fingerprint, only one face template can be enrolled per user, and a vendor message is passed from the HAL all the way to the client callback to allow GUI indication about the enrolled face template".
What? Isn't there already "Trusted Face"? Yes, there is. And this isn't that. That is not considered biometric data, that is considered to be a form of avoiding locking, under the "Smart Lock" category of your settings, which includes On Body Detection, Trusted Places, Trusted Devices, Trusted Face and Voice Match. This does not use the same pathways.
But Mario! When I'm reading through the code, what in the world is "android.hardware.face"? That's a great question. I would suggest we ask Google that in 24 days.
The main reason this is interesting code, is because it modifies the TrustManager and Keyguard in order to "eliminate duplication". Essentially, Trusted Face currently exists, whatever "face authentication" ends up being called is, would cause duplication of functionality, and so TrustManager is being modified to eliminate Trusted Face so that there isn't redundancy.
But Mario! Why do we think this will be in the Pixel 3 in 24 days, and isn't just some Pie in the sky (haha) thing Google wants to do at some point? I dunno, the heck do I know?
I just think it's a little interesting, as noted by Sam Afolabbi of TecHLecTor, that the guy who added all this code to the project is one of the main people at Intel who added similar functionality into Intel's RealSense, which is used by a whole lot of windows PC's to introduce face unlock functionality through Windows Hello. That doesn't indicate anything about the Pixel 3, but it does indicate that a somethign that reminds us of FaceID is coming to AOSP and replacing Trusted Face.
I think it'd be interesting if someone in the community who had a Pixel 3 or 3 XL or a Pixelbook 2018 (the one that doesn't look like the Surface) and could screenshot the settings on one of those devices.
That'd be neat. Personally I sorta like the FPS more than FaceID.