This seems to have been asked many times in the past; when using a webcam was not supported by the emulator and instead a checker-box image was shown. Today the emulator does support using the webcam on the host system. I cannot find any documentation on it, except for people saying it just works automatically.
The following link is for the developer docs. It states that a webcam on the host device is supported, but doesn’t give any instructions.
http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/devices/emulator.html
I am using SDK 17 on a Windows 7 (x64) machine. My virtual device is Google APIs (API Level 10). When I use the camera app, the preview is just a solid white image, and when I take a picture, i just get a sample image with the android logo. My webcam is plugged in and working, but the AVD does not activate it.
Is there any documentation on getting the camera working?
I actually don’t need the web-cam to work. If I could simply supply an image file to be used instead of the android logo, that would be enough for me to test my app with.
UPDATE
Rebooted my desktop and now my camera is activated when the AVD is launched, but still get the same results in the emulator.
It works on the Ice Cream Sandwich emulator. This feature is simply not available on earlier versions.