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.
It’s definitely possible. I had to use this once or twice, so I didn’t put much research into it and used Droidcam, which can be used via USB as well as WiFi. It works, but it’s not open source, more of a freemium model. I’m sure there’s an open source solution somewhere for doing that (seeing as it shouldn’t be too technically difficult, for all I can tell, just more of a niche thing).