Overviewer is a new app that turns an iPhone into a document camera for zoom and virtual learning

As students and teachers continue to work from home amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Overviewer hit the scene as a new iOS app to turn your iPhone into a document camera on Zoom and other video conferencing applications . The app is intended as a replacement or substitute for traditional document cameras, which are common in education but expensive and cumbersome to use.

Document cameras are traditionally top-down cameras that allow teachers to display worksheets and other documents in a class of teachers. With many schools virtually working, however, it has become a challenging problem to solve.

Overview comes from developer Charlie Chapman, who is also behind the popular Dark Noise environmental 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 struck, she had to figure out how to teach a bunch of 5- and 6-year-olds how to draw letters over Zoom. Initially, she made her own document camera with her iPhone and the standard camera app. Zoom has a great feature where you can share the screen of your iPhone by connecting to your laptop with a lightning 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 actually rotate when you rotate it sideways (just some labels), so you can only share your phone in portrait mode, which has large black bars on each side of the zoom call and a small video stream of whatever you want Share.

Overview solves these problems by giving iPhone users the opportunity to have their iPhone act as a document camera for video conferencing applications such as Zoom. Overview can be used in Zoom, for example, if your iPhone is connected to your computer via Lightning or even via AirPlay.

Then the supervisor will send exactly what the iPhone’s camera sees to Zoom, including support for property rotating in the landscape. It allows teachers to use their iPhone like a document camera and easily show students while working on math problems, drawing and other tasks.

Here is a video showing the app in use:

Overviewer is a free app in the App Store. If you’re a teacher or know someone what it is, this is an excellent application worth trying out.

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