With iPhone 14, Apple may be planning on removing the inelegant kludge (notch) as early as next year, with in-display Face ID and/or Touch ID. A new U.S. patent granted today, “Electronic device display for through-display imaging,” covers both forms of Apple’s secure biometric authentication embedded into the display.
It would even be possible to embed the front-facing camera into the screen, though this is likely to be a later development.
The main focus of the patent is embedding an image sensor into the display in order to read a fingerprint – that is, embedded Touch ID.
For simplicity of description, many embodiments that follow reference a construction in which an electronic device implements through-display imaging to capture one or more images of a fingerprint of a user touching a specified region (an “imaging region,” above an imaging aperture) of the display of the electronic device. – [Apple]
However, Apple notes that the same approach can be taken for other forms of biometric identification, including Face ID.
As noted above, an electronic device can implement through-display imaging for any suitable imaging, sensing, data aggregation, or light capture purpose including, but not limited to […] face recognition. – [Apple]
MacDailyNews Take: The inelegant kludge cannot die soon enough!