A cheap alternative to the Wolfvision presenter for projecting mobile devices on a screen during a presentation.

Presenting (and projecting the screens of) real mobile devices to an audience has always been a hassle. Especially the ones, that don’t have an USB VGA port.

Up to now this meant: Rent or buy an expensive and suboptimal Wolfvision Document Presenter. Suboptimal because most of these devices have low frame rates and are made for projecting documents and not glowing screens.

A cheap yet great alternative is a self-built solution(invented by the ingenious Ronnie Saurenmann and tuned by myself) using a small tripod, a Microsoft LifeCam Cinema Webcam and a Silverlight 4 Out-Of-Browser Application, running on the presentation laptop.

The Silverlight Out-Of-Browser application takes care of displaying the camera image windowed or full screen and handles scaling (Stretch Uniform, Stretch Fill and Stretch None). It also allows to set the video source (in case there are multiple web cams connected to the system). Finally it has a “Freeze Frame” function.

A small problem is posed by the LifeCam’s default settings that permanently re-focus and re-set the exposure. You can however manually override both these settings in the Microsoft LifeCam tool before you start the Silverlight app.

The only “fiddling” you have to do is getting a small tripod and mounting the LifeCam facing down.

The Zip file contains the Silverlight Out-Of-Browser Application source code for you to enhance to your liking.

I hope this helps!