Google Meet has rolled out a new series of immersive backgrounds that users can apply during chats to give meetings and individual users a bit of flair.
Video calls have become an integral part of today’s culture. While the likes of FaceTime and WhatsApp had already made them commonplace (an honorable mention goes out to Skype for kicking off the trend and then disappearing), the COVID-19 pandemic has played a vital role in steering platforms such as Zoom and Meet into everyday relevancy as well. Meetings, classes, doctor’s appointments, counselling sessions are often conducted online, with more frequency than ever in the past. Sure, such appointments and meetings were previously available online as well, but the past few years and the afore-mentioned platforms have increased their frequency by a lot. Netizens both old and young are now incredibly familiar and comfortable with online video calls and integrate them into daily life with ease.
Now that video calls have become a widely accessible and accepted commodity, the next step forward is obviously improving and/or tweaking what we have at hand. That’s the approach Zoom took with its backgrounds, allowing users to essentially set up virtually anything in their backgrounds by turning a caller’s surroundings into a green screen display of sorts. It’s quite the fun feature, and has led to no shortage of online videos and memes, which is good for the brand as well. The next platform to throw its hat into the ring (or more appropriately, the background), is Meet. Meet’s also introducing a bunch of pre-made backgrounds that users can integrate to give their video call personas a bit more flavor and gravitas, if you will.
The new interface update was announced via Google in a blog post made by the company’s devs. In it, they reveal two new backgrounds, fully animated and very well rendered to really lean into providing an immersive feel. The backgrounds, labelled Café and Condo for reasons that I’m sure my readers can puzzle out on their own, even have separate day and night options to better reflect the time-zones callers are attending their meetings from. A big part of Meet is how accessible it has made team-building from across the world. Animations such as falling snow or moving people in the background help the immersive look of the entire call come together perfectly.
Read next: Google Search to Feature New Carousel With Video Results, Experiments With Feeling Curious
Video calls have become an integral part of today’s culture. While the likes of FaceTime and WhatsApp had already made them commonplace (an honorable mention goes out to Skype for kicking off the trend and then disappearing), the COVID-19 pandemic has played a vital role in steering platforms such as Zoom and Meet into everyday relevancy as well. Meetings, classes, doctor’s appointments, counselling sessions are often conducted online, with more frequency than ever in the past. Sure, such appointments and meetings were previously available online as well, but the past few years and the afore-mentioned platforms have increased their frequency by a lot. Netizens both old and young are now incredibly familiar and comfortable with online video calls and integrate them into daily life with ease.
Now that video calls have become a widely accessible and accepted commodity, the next step forward is obviously improving and/or tweaking what we have at hand. That’s the approach Zoom took with its backgrounds, allowing users to essentially set up virtually anything in their backgrounds by turning a caller’s surroundings into a green screen display of sorts. It’s quite the fun feature, and has led to no shortage of online videos and memes, which is good for the brand as well. The next platform to throw its hat into the ring (or more appropriately, the background), is Meet. Meet’s also introducing a bunch of pre-made backgrounds that users can integrate to give their video call personas a bit more flavor and gravitas, if you will.
The new interface update was announced via Google in a blog post made by the company’s devs. In it, they reveal two new backgrounds, fully animated and very well rendered to really lean into providing an immersive feel. The backgrounds, labelled Café and Condo for reasons that I’m sure my readers can puzzle out on their own, even have separate day and night options to better reflect the time-zones callers are attending their meetings from. A big part of Meet is how accessible it has made team-building from across the world. Animations such as falling snow or moving people in the background help the immersive look of the entire call come together perfectly.
Read next: Google Search to Feature New Carousel With Video Results, Experiments With Feeling Curious