Google may turn your Android phone into a plug-and-play USB webcam

On the one hand, yay, finally

Reciprocally, it's like a 8 line usb gadgetd shell script. Its downright embarassing such easy to do efforts take so long to enter the rest of the world, and typically wrapped in so many technical & legal constraints.

Is this the first time we can say “iPhone has had this feature for years”? :)

It’s quite excellent btw. Almost magical. There is a “Studio Lighting” preset that truly does give you a studio lighting like aura, and lights up the foreground while darkening the background.

You can kind of still see the artifacts of the AI processing as the subject moves, but it’s not too discernible.

Here’s a video I recorded using this feature: https://youtu.be/HqS5r18xRP0

Oh, and it works flawlessly on wifi too so you don’t even have to be plugged in!

If Google is able to do this on the pixel line of phones and also retain all of the quality and processing that the pixel cameras have this will be incredibly useful. Otherwise it'll just end up being like trying to use third party camera software on the pixel where it's essentially useless because the camera looks like crap now.

This is already practically available with DroidCamX.

It is not plug and play, but it works well over wifi and usb.

Ugh, finally.