It took a global pandemic for us to realize the importance of having a laptop with a good webcam. Ironically, in 2019 laptops without webcams started appearing because no one was using them.
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Although we no longer rely exclusively on video calls to see another person, they are still important; Some companies have embraced the new work-from-home philosophy, and at the very least, many people have discovered just how useful video calls can be. And that brings us to the big issue, the image quality of webcams.
Use the mobile as a webcam
To put it mildly, the vast majority of webcams are awful, with low resolution and worse image processing that in many cases only sees a blur where the face of the person we’re talking to should be . .
But many people don’t want to buy a webcam just for the few video calls they’ll be making, let alone buy a new laptop. At Apple, they came up with a very clever solution, a feature called “Continuity Camera”; behind this strange name is one of the most useful functions Apple has released in years, allowing us to use the iPhone as a webcam.
Using an Android phone as a webcam has become very popular during the pandemic, but you usually had to install a third-party app to do so. However, you may not have to do this in the future, as Google adds support for turning Android devices into USB webcams!
— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) February 2, 2023
Google isn’t going to be far behind. As Mishaal Rahman discovered, the company is working on a function that will allow us to use the mobile as a webcam, using the rear cameras to record ourselves. Even the cheapest phones have better sensors than those used in cheap webcams, so this would be a significant jump in image quality.
To use the mobile as a webcam, it would have to be connected via USB, after activating the option in the system configuration. In theory, this should allow the computer’s operating system to detect the mobile as if it were a USB webcam, displaying the image recorded by the main sensor.
Continuity Camera lets you use an iPhone as a webcam
In fact, there are already Android apps that do the same thing, but you have to find and install them. The discovery function will not require anything to install, and just by connecting the mobile to the computer we would have a webcam. The ideal would be to have some type of support to put the mobile above the laptop, like those that already exist for the iPhone, but for now there is no leak to this subject.
This feature should arrive with the future Android 14.
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