Phonegap Camera Control

Question

As far as I can tell the Phonegap API has a couple of options to for capturing a picture, but they all 'launch' the phones camera and then return to the app with the path to the captured image.

Is it possible to display the camera stream in a control on a page in an app so the image is captured 'within the app'? E.g. like Instagram, the user is not taken out of the app to capture the image i.e I require custom camera to be opened in a part of my current application page only.

If this is accomplished with a plugin, is there an existing third party plugin for Custom Camera or would I need to write this myself?

I REALLY like the whole idea of Phonegap, especially with Phonegap Build (awesome) but if I can't get this kind of functionality I'm going to have to go native :-(

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I needed the same 'live camera view' for my augmented reality (AR) application. Phonegap does indeed not offer a live camera view yet. Therefore, I am using a Wikitude plugin for Phonegap.

Although Wikitude is an AR SDK, the basic functionality it offers is that exact camera live view.

How it works? You define a 'world', which is a basic HTML page. Once loaded, the background of this webpage will be your camera live view. In this webpage, you can still run PhoneGap Javascript code. You can call this 'world' whenever you want from your PhoneGap code.

Where to start You can get the PhoneGap plugin from https://github.com/Wikitude/wikitude-phonegap. Setup instructions and example projects are included. There is an unlimited trial of the Wikitude SDK available, you will need that as well.