What is the "Integrated I" camera on Lenovo Thinkpad laptop?

Question

My laptop (Lenovo ThinkPad T490s, Ubuntu 20.04) shows 2 different cameras for the integrated cameras:

[   12.274248] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.50 device Integrated Camera (13d3:56ba)
[   12.285342] input: Integrated Camera: Integrated C as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-8/1-8:1.0/input/input20
[   12.286838] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.50 device Integrated Camera (13d3:56ba)
[   12.288919] input: Integrated Camera: Integrated I as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-8/1-8:1.2/input/input21

The cameras can be seen on the laptop as two separate physical cameras. The Integrated C is clearly the normal webcam. The Integrated I camera on the other hand appears to give a low resolution, dark black&white image.

What is this Integrated I camera, and is it possible to do something useful with it on Linux?

Answer 1

The I camera is the Infrared Sensor (some explanations), mainly used for facial recognition (like Windows Hello).
The C device is the real sensor in this case