Hi, I don't know exactly where to ask this but I think this subforum is the most appropriate one.

Recently, an app called PhotoMath has been released. It uses the phone camera and Android OCR APIs to recognize text and to solve simple math equations. That gave me an idea.

Going straight to the point: I own an Android phone (a Moto G running Android Kit Kat). Is it posible to use the phone's camera as an input source and have the output on the computer? I was thinking something like: I see an equation, I point the camera to it, it recognizes the text and send it to my PC (throught the internet or USB) so it can be solved e.g. a C or Python program receives it as an input, solve it and prints the result.

Is that posible?

iirc, i've seen how-tos for linux to "turn smart phone into web camera" or something like that.

But would that work? OCR?

It could be possible. At some point you have to have a way to send the image into the ocr program.

Might be easier to take a photo and use it as input to ocr program?

Try this to stream the image to your pc for recording: IP Webcam.
Alternatively take a photo with your android phone & have it sync automatically with your Google drive or Dropbox account.

I will see what can I do but using a photo file as input would be tedious. I rather try to make it work directly.