Zoom’s Immersive View lets up to 25 people share one virtual background

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Zoom has let you use virtual backgrounds for ages now, even letting you use animated GIFs to comedic effect. Now it’s expanding that functionality to let you do away with the “checkerboard” display and assembles video chat participants onto the same virtual background. The new feature is called Immersive View.

Think of it as a virtual conference room, with everyone’s headshot placed around a table. That’s one of Zoom’s inbuilt scenes, but you can upload your own scenes if you prefer to inject some hilarity into the proceedings. How does having a conference call around a luau sound? How about in a secret volcano base? The world is your backdrop, as long as it makes some sense if your video call feeds are overlaid.

Zoom’s Immersive View can host up to 25 people on the new Zoom feature. You can add more than that number to the call though, and Zoom will show those in the usual thumbnail strip that you see when you use a singular Zoom window. Hosts will choose between manually placing callers in their desired position or letting Zoom automatically do it. Recordings will only show the usual gallery or speaker views, which is kind of boring.

If all of that sounds familiar, it should be. Microsoft Teams had something very similar with up to 49 participants in their Together Mode. Microsoft’s effort used AI to grab your image and arrange it with your other video call participants into a virtual space.

Zoom’s Immersive View is now rolling out for Free and Pro accounts.

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Editors’ Recommendations:

• You can now take Zoom calls right from Facebook’s Portal TV
• Zoom is making automatic closed captioning free for all users
• Zoom is working on an email service and a calendar app
• This clever camera app lets you be anyone on Zoom

Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.