Easy and cost-effective! Here's how you can turn your smartphone as a webcam on Microsoft Teams

If you're looking for an easy and cost-effective way to upgrade your work-from-home experience of teleconferencing, you can use your phone. Gone are the days when your low-resolution cameras on your laptop kept you from looking and feeling your best. If you don't want to buy a webcam, you can easily use your phone's camera and create one for yourself.

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Here is how you can make the most of your next video call-

Step1: Download DroidCam on your Windows 10 laptop or desktop, and on your Android phone. Quit all chat programs to ensure a clean install and avoid reboots.

Step 2: Set up the apps accordingly and make sure your Android and PC are on the same Wi-Fi network.

Step 3: Launch the DroidCam app on your Android phone and on Windows. Grant the permissions on Android and enter in the WiFi IP and the DroidCam Port numbers in the Windows 10 app so they match on both PC and Android. You also can set the experience up via USB-cable, too.

Step 4: Press Start

Step 5: Open Teams and change your webcam input to DroidCam

To get it to work with your videoconferencing software, you will always need to launch the DroidCam PC client and app first. Then, go to your videoconferencing app's settings and change the camera and microphone input to DroidCam and DroidCam Virtual Audio. It should immediately start using your phone's hardware.

On your phone, Turn on Wi-Fi and connect to your home network as you normally would.

Start the phone app, it will show Wi-Fi IP & Port information. If the IP is all zeros (0.0.0.0) – you are not connected to a Wi-Fi network.

On the PC client, make sure the connection method is “Wi-Fi/LAN”. Enter the IP and Port as displayed on the phone. Click Start.

The phone app should start showing the camera output. The PC client should start updating the “webcam” output, you can check in Skype/Zoom/etc. Find ‘video input’ settings in the options/preferences of these programs.

Things to keep in mind before using your phone as a webcam:

Your Android phone needs to be running Android 5.0 or higher. To check, go to Settings > About Phone > Android version. iPhones need to be on iOS 9 or later, and you can check by going to Settings > General > About > Software Version.