Using Camera in Flutter

This tutorial shows a basic usage example of the camera plugin https://pub.dev/packages/camera
We will create a widget which will display a camera preview

Other tutorials which I found would pass the camera object to the widget, but I wanted to make a widget self containing and do all the camera initialization inside it.
One challenge which I was facing was an async initialization of the camera that's why I am using a FutureBuilder

Here is the complete source code of the widget:

// livePic.dart
import 'package:camera/camera.dart';
import 'package:flutter/widgets.dart';

class LivePic extends StatefulWidget {
  @override
  LivePicState createState() => LivePicState();
}

class LivePicState extends State<LivePic> {
  CameraController _controller;
  Future<void> _initializeControllerFuture;

  Future<CameraDescription> getCamera() async {
    final cameras = await availableCameras();
    return cameras.first;
  }

  Future<void> initializeController() async {
    final camera = await getCamera();
    _controller = CameraController(camera, ResolutionPreset.max);
    return _controller.initialize();
  }

  @override
  void initState() {
    super.initState();
    _initializeControllerFuture = initializeController();
  }

  @override
  void dispose() {
    // Dispose of the controller when the widget is disposed.
    _controller.dispose();
    super.dispose();
  }

  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return FutureBuilder<void>(
        future: _initializeControllerFuture,
        builder: (context, snapshot) {
          if (snapshot.connectionState == ConnectionState.done) {
            // If the Future is complete, display the preview.
            return CameraPreview(_controller);
          } else {
            // Otherwise, display a loading indicator.
            return Placeholder();
          }
        });
  }
}

The method getCamera returns the first available camera. I think there is a possibility to choose front or back camera explicitly, but I haven't tried it yet

  Future<CameraDescription> getCamera() async {
    final cameras = await availableCameras();
    return cameras.first;
  }

When initializeController method is called (from initState) it sets the object variable _controller and initializes it. Plugin documentation says that the Camera controller needs to be initialized before it can be used.

 Future<void> initializeController() async {
    final camera = await getCamera();
    _controller = CameraController(camera, ResolutionPreset.max);
    return _controller.initialize();
  }

The build method returns a FutureBuilder which in this case allows to rebuild the widget after the camera initialization is finished:

  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return FutureBuilder<void>(
        future: _initializeControllerFuture,
        builder: (context, snapshot) {
          if (snapshot.connectionState == ConnectionState.done) {
            // If the Future is complete, display the preview.
            return CameraPreview(_controller);
          } else {
            // Otherwise, display a placeholder.
            return Placeholder();
          }
        });
  }

That's it, here is my main.dart:

import 'package:flutter/material.dart';
import 'package:poseapp/livePic.dart';

void main() {
  runApp(MyApp());
}

class MyApp extends StatelessWidget {
  // This widget is the root of your application.
  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return MaterialApp(
      title: 'Flutter Demo',
      theme: ThemeData(
        // This is the theme of your application.
        //
        // Try running your application with "flutter run". You'll see the
        // application has a blue toolbar. Then, without quitting the app, try
        // changing the primarySwatch below to Colors.green and then invoke
        // "hot reload" (press "r" in the console where you ran "flutter run",
        // or simply save your changes to "hot reload" in a Flutter IDE).
        // Notice that the counter didn't reset back to zero; the application
        // is not restarted.
        primarySwatch: Colors.blue,
        // This makes the visual density adapt to the platform that you run
        // the app on. For desktop platforms, the controls will be smaller and
        // closer together (more dense) than on mobile platforms.
        visualDensity: VisualDensity.adaptivePlatformDensity,
      ),
      home: LivePic(),
    );
  }
}

Conclusion
This was a basic proof of concept - my goal is to do some gesture recognition and I will try to process the image data which comes from the camera. Next steps would be to try to use OpenCV and/or TensorFlowLite