Using webcam to simulate phone camera in WP7 emulator

Question

Does anyone know if it's possible to use a webcam to simulate the phone camera in the Windows Phone 7 emulator? This seems like it would be useful for creating augmented reality applications with the current tools.

Answer 1

It's not possible. Also at release third party developers will not have access to the camera directly. Instead you can initiate the camera tasks which will essentially start up the camera capture dialog to allow the user to grab a picture. while they are doing this your code has no control over anything. When the user takes the picture control is returned to your program along with the picture that the user took.

Answer 2

Here is my trick.

Add a webcam gateway to receive HTTP request and return captured image from PC webcam and modify WP7 project slightly to simulate CameraCaptureTask behavior(but not 100% identical). Not perfect, but it makes WP7 emulator more interesting.