The problem is that the Vijim doesn’t let you connect arms at anything but the tips of other arms. I wanted to reconsider option 2, but with the horizontal arm below the monitor, and a vertical extension going from it to the camera. Are We There Yet? The Wall-E Configuration
That was a minor annoyance, though, at least partially because one of the side-effects of using Webcam Effects’ virtual camera is that when I would start meetings, for the first 10 seconds or so the virtual camera would not output an image. Turns out that Logitech’s answer for this would consistently crash on my M1 Mac, but both OBS (which is not super user friendly, and is massively overpowered for this) and Webcam Effects (which was free, but in order to use it for streaming I ended up paying $20 to enable that capability) were usable for doing this. That means that this was the first approach to require a software to run to flip the image.
There’s only one real problem I’ve found with this solution - the camera is mounted upside down, and that means the image is flipped. It was still easy to swing the camera out of the way, and the only occlusion other than the camera itself was the very very thin tripod extenders. In terms of the physical and logistical setup for the camera, I really like this. This was early in the days of figuring out how to set up home workspaces (compared to the world today), and it wasn’t easy to find approaches online to solving this problem, so with probably a dozen or more Home Depot trips I came up with my own very much kludged solution to having my camera mounted in the middle of my screen: I wanted to give people the same experience they had when we would chat in person - if I’m talking with you, most of the time I should be looking at you and you should see me looking at you. Very quickly it became obvious that the challenge with standard camera placement (at the time most cameras were being mounted on top of monitors, but some were to the side) is that when someone is looking at your picture, because that’s not where the camera is, they look like they’re looking away from you. When the pandemic hit, and most of the tech world was searching for in-stock monitors and cameras, one of the problems I became obsessed with was where to mount my camera. That said, this is quite likely one of my most trivial blog posts in recent memory. I wanted to capture my camera mounting journey in a public place so I can more easily refer to it.
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