This blog post is kind of a playful idea on the iSight. However, if you want to take it seriously, you should consider using the High Quality Camera with the Pi as a USB webcam. The sensor on that HQ camera is HUGE, thus the picture quality is really really good, especially when you take time to figure out the focus and such [1] [2]. It's better than most if not all the webcams you can buy on the market. It's definitely more compact, cheaper, and less hassle than using the whole Mirrorless + HDMI capture-card setup if you want to upgrade your Zoom appearance.
On the software side, I have worked on the exact Pi-as-a-webcam software project for a while [0]. It's quite customizable and you can play with parameters of the camera to further extract values out of the hardware. I also am hoping, in the future, to implement "smart" functions such as auto-panning the camera and such.
However, I still couldn't figure out a good case for it so the setup looks kinda crummy, not as slick as the iSight.
0: https://github.com/showmewebcam/showmewebcam
1: https://hackaday.io/project/174479/gallery#715fab460d86cbd11...
2: https://hackaday.io/project/174479/gallery#da539049c84e7fd64...
On the software side, I have worked on the exact Pi-as-a-webcam software project for a while [0]. It's quite customizable and you can play with parameters of the camera to further extract values out of the hardware. I also am hoping, in the future, to implement "smart" functions such as auto-panning the camera and such.
However, I still couldn't figure out a good case for it so the setup looks kinda crummy, not as slick as the iSight.
0: https://github.com/showmewebcam/showmewebcam
1: https://hackaday.io/project/174479/gallery#715fab460d86cbd11...
2: https://hackaday.io/project/174479/gallery#da539049c84e7fd64...