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.
Macs can do this with iPhones… natively. I can tell either of my Macs to take a picture from my iPhone, and it’ll just do it. I’m not sure why that is a thing (e.g. if my iPhone isn’t in my hand, it’s not pointing at anything I want a shot of), but it is. Also, they make clips that attach the iPhone to the top of the Mac(Book) and point the screen away from you, letting its 2-3 cameras point at you, looking over the screen at you.
So if Apple does it, the big Android/Windows/Linux players want to make it an option, too. Fortunately this has been a thing (on the Apple side) for a couple years now, so, even before I skimmed the comments, I thought, “I should fucking hope so.”