And that without calling in twice. Laptop cameras as normally very crap. They say “1080p”, but most of the time they are 720p or less and have maybe 2 megapixels or less. Phones have way more and can be connected to the laptop via USB. There must be a way to use their camera over USB, right?
I know of USB over LAN, so surely this is possible.
Recent Android phones support UVC, which is the same protocol used by webcams. Pixels for example support it.
^^^ this. And for older phones, if I remember correctly, I used something like this like 6 years ago: https://camo.com/camera. I’m afraid it’s not open source, but it looked trustworthy at that time, and I think it worked in Linux (as a standard webcam) but I might be mistaken. Take it with caution but from there you can start searching and maybe will find better alternatives.