While students and teachers continue to work from home amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Overviewer came on the scene as a new iOS app to turn your iPhone into a document camera with Zoom and other video conferencing apps. The application must be a substitute or substitute for traditional document cameras, common in education, but expensive and complicated to use.
Document cameras are traditionally top-down cameras that allow teachers to show spreadsheets and other documents to a teacher’s classroom. With many schools operating virtually, however, this has become a challenging problem to solve.
The Overviewer comes from developer Charlie Chapman, who is also behind the popular Dark Noise surround sound app. Charlie shared some interesting details about the inspiration behind the app in a blog post today:
My wife is a kindergarten teacher and when COVID came along, she had to figure out how to teach a group of 5 and 6 year olds to draw letters on Zoom. Initially, she made her own document camera using her iPhone and the standard camera app. Zoom has a wonderful feature where you can share your iPhone screen by connecting it to your laptop with an electrical cable or even wirelessly via AirPlay, but when you open the camera app, there are two problems.
1. There are a lot of buttons and chrome around the camera view, so it looks clumsy
2. The camera app does not rotate when you turn it on its side (just some of the labels), so you can only share your phone in portrait mode, which means huge black bars on each side of the zoom call and a small flow of video of what you want to share.
The Overviewer solves these problems by giving iPhone users the ability to make their iPhone function as a document camera for video conferencing applications like Zoom. For example, the Overviewer can be used in Zoom when your iPhone is connected to the computer via Lightning or even via AirPlay.
The Overviewer will then send Zoom exactly what the iPhone camera sees, including support for rotating landscape property. This allows teachers to use the iPhone as a document camera and easily show students while they work on math, drawing and other tasks.
Here is a video showing the application in use:
Overviewer is a completely free application on the App Store. If you are a teacher or know someone who is, this is an excellent application that is worth trying.
FTC: We use affiliate links for cars that generate revenue. More.
Check out 9to5Mac on YouTube for more news from Apple: