How to Use Your Cell Phone as a Webcam for Teaching Remotely

The recent surge in demand for webcams from teachers looking to teach remotely (and everyone else working from home) has significantly driven up the price of webcams. Many of the teachers we work with simply can’t afford or justify such premium pricing.

The workaround? Repurposing an old cell phone as a webcam… did you know there’s an app for that?!

So, why use a cell phone?

• Availability: You likely have — or know someone who has — an older cell phone that still works, but is no longer being used. These are perfect candidates for being repurposed into webcams.
• Quality: The camera on most cell phones produced in the past five years are capable of high definition and are as good – or better – than the cameras on most web cams available on the market today.
• Speed: You can solve this problem right now with your cell phone. No need to order anything and wait for delivery.
• Cost: You can set it up in a matter of minutes for the fraction of the cost of buying a webcam.
• Mobility: It can be connected to your computer via WiFi, which gives you a wireless, mobile webcam.

Despite all these benefits, please keep in mind a couple potential drawbacks:

• If you are using your primary cell phone as a webcam, using your phone for other activities while broadcasting will interrupt the feed.
• If connecting to your computer via WiFi, you can have reliability issues depending on your WiFi signal.

Our top pick for an app that gives your old (or current) cell phone all the webcam capabilities you’ll need is EpocCam, which is available in the Apple and Android app stores. There are a few versions of the app:

• Free – Limits your video resolution and has a watermark
• Pro – Gives you HD resolution without a watermark
• Multi – Allows you to set up multiple cell phones as webcams all connected to the same PC

Here’s a quick primer on how to set up the EpocCam app and use your cell phone as a webcam:

1. Connect your cell phone to your computer via USB cable WiFi
2. Download the EpocCam app from the Apple and Android app stores
3. Go to com and download the computer driver for either windows or mac-OS
4. Open the app on your cell phone and after a few seconds it should connect to your computer. This should now be selectable as a web cam in any application that utilizes web cams.

Here are a few tips on how to use the EpocCam app:

• If you use WiFi, your cell phone must be connected to the same network as your computer. This doesn’t mean your computer has to be connected via WiFi though. In our setup for our own online teaching/tutorials, our computer is wired but our WiFi hot spot connects to the same network. This allows our computer to have the reliability of a wired connection but use a cell phone as a web cam over WiFi.
• If you plan to use this as a mobile webcam, you will want to consider a gimbal stabilizer for your cell phone. This will smooth out the video if you are moving the camera around during your broadcast. We like the DJI Osmo Mobile 3, but there are many others on the market that provide similar features.

We will be doling out advice / tips on how to set up your own remote teaching environment over the next couple of weeks – and we hope you find this information helpful. Don’t hesitate to drop us a line if you have any questions.

Alex Baddock

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