Zoom has introduced the new Immersive View feature to its video conferencing platform, which aims to make your online meetings and hangouts more fun and, well, immersive. The addition was originally announced during the company‘s Zoomtopia conference last year, and had only recently rolled out to all of the platform’s users; that includes both Free and Pro accounts.
Using Zoom’s existing virtual background technology which has the ability to separate users from their real life environments, Immersive View takes these cropped portraits of all participants and automatically arranges them in a realistic-looking virtual setting. These include locations such as a meeting room, cafeteria, classrooms and more – therefore, providing an illusion being in the same environment as the other participants of your session.
The company noted that session hosts can further customise the location by resizing and move around the portraits of participants, as well as upload their own image to be used as backgrounds. For the latter, Zoom recommends users to follow its guidelines on file type, aspect ratio and resolution before uploading their custom images – much like when personalising the existing virtual background feature.
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In terms of user limit, the company says that the Immersive View mode can include a total of 25 attendees in a session – placing them in larger virtual settings such as an auditorium or lecture hall. Any more than that is actually allowed, but those who did not make the cut to be “seated” on-screen are instead placed in a strip of video thumbnails at the top of the scene. You know, like being in a live concert – except for the fact that you’re situated the furthest away from the stage. Sad, but at least you’re there, right?
As usual for these new additions, make sure that your Zoom client on Windows or macOS is updated to the latest version in order to enjoy this new feature. But if you’re insistent on not updating (for whatever reason), the company noted that you can still participate in Immersive View-enabled meetings, but you’ll be greeted with the boring old Speaker or Gallery View instead.
(Source: Zoom [Official blog])
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