Don't Windows Hello camera devices have some kind of hardware attestation? I'm sure verification schemes like this will eventually go down that path soon.
My guess is that's probably one of the reasons Google tried to push for Play Store only apps, provide a measurable/verifiable software chain for stuff like this.
You're not wrong, but I have had to do video verification over a phone once, and it seemed quite advanced. It would flash through a number of colors and settings and take probably 30 frames of you. I presume they're checking for "this came from a screen and not a human", but of course I have no idea how it works, so I don't know if it's truly sophisticated or not.
As I understand it, 'Windows Hello' requires a near-IR image alongside the RGB image.
It's not the fancy structured light of phone-style Face ID, but it still protects against the more common ways of fooling biometrics, like holding up a photo or wearing a simple paper mask.
That’s not how they work. They emit structured light in the form of an array of infrared dots and they measure the time of flight to where the dots strike something.
Maybe new ones are different but that’s how they used to be. Little Kinect devices, really, for sensing faces instead of whole people.
My guess is that's probably one of the reasons Google tried to push for Play Store only apps, provide a measurable/verifiable software chain for stuff like this.