Zoom is bringing a new addition to its platform that is
going to make video calls feel or look like office meetings with a new virtual background
feature for the videos. The feature is called Immersive View and it was
announced last year at Zoom’s Zoomtopia conference. The company has now launched
it for Free and Pro accounts attending meetings and webinars with up to 25
participants.
While Zoom already has a bunch of virtual background
features, this one will give a more realistic appearance to participants in the
video call, making them feel like they are actually present at a workplace
location.
Immersive View can be turned on by the meeting host from the menu, where other options like Speaker View and Gallery View are displayed. By enabling the option, attendees of the meeting will be automatically placed in a variety of built-in virtual scenes like a board room or auditorium. The meeting host can also manually place the attendees in the scenes.
There will be other control options for Immersive View, such
as resizing attendees, moving them around the scene, and uploading your own
scene to try something different than the options given by Zoom. According to
Zoom, in order to have the best results, it is important to adjust and match the
file type, aspect ratio, and resolution of the image that you want to use as an
Immersive View background.
There are also some limitations to the feature. For instance,
for calls larger than 25 people, the remaining participants will be shown in a
strip of video thumbnails at the top of the scene.
Although the feature itself is impressive, it isn’t something
new to other video call platforms like Microsoft Teams and Skype. Microsoft introduced
a similar feature called Together Mode for both Teams and Skype in 2020, which lets
participants experience the same virtual scene together.
