Yesterday an American YouTuber stated in a review of iPhone X that to use Animoji you don't need all the sensors that the TrueDepth camera has implemented. He demonstrated that Animoji can work without problems only if the face is tracked by the front camera of the iPhone X, and testing the theory we realized that if you cover the infrared projector and the laser sensor, nothing changes.
I think anyone with an iPhone X can see that Animoji can easily be used to make videos, but Apple says they don't just use the standard camera for that. They claim that they also use the infrared projector and the laser sensor to monitor the movements of the face while we record animoji with the iPhone X.
Although it is possible that these two components are periodically used to monitor the face, for the most part of the use, they are not needed to make Animoji on iPhone X. It is possible that Animoji no longer reproduces 100% faithfully what what do we do after a period of time in which those sensors do not scan our face, but this must be tested over time.
Of course, Apple could not recognize the fact that Animoji can work without those special iPhone X sensors, otherwise people would have asked the company why the old iPhone models don't have this system. In this idea, Apple will always say how necessary the entire TrueDepth Camera system is for iPhone X Animoji, no matter what the reality is.
