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One of the best known Lenses is the potato head – seen in a viral tweet where it appeared in a business meeting, but appeared in our virtual coffee room nearly a week prior to that.
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(You don’t need to be a Snapchat user to download and use this software.) This tool manipulates the output from a real webcam, using a library of Snapchat “Lenses” to transform the user into a variety of entities. If you have a Logitech webcam then Logitech Capture is a simple tool that can be used for this.Ī commonly-used virtual webcam, that made a few appearances in our virtual coffee room sessions, is Snapchat’s Snap Camera.
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A simple use-case for some virtual webcam software is to perform basic background replacement when using an online meeting platform that doesn’t have that capability built in. Whatever video stream the virtual webcam generates, which could be entirely artificial, will be used in the meeting in exactly the same way as a real webcam. Surely there’s more fun to be had.? It was time to enter the world of virtual webcams.Ī virtual webcam is a piece of software that pretends to be a webcam in order for online meeting platforms, etc. I do have a library of such images opportunistically collected from recent meetings…īut that’s still just a static background image. if your colleague walks away to get a coffee, etc. It’s better if you can get a clean image, e.g. In this case I used a screen grab from a previous meeting and (badly) replaced my colleague (Christian) with a bunch of copy-and-paste blocks from nearby in the image. Next level trolling – set your video conf virtual background to be a snapshot of one of your colleagues' home offices 🙂 /PkwhjiV6rW My first steps into more creative use of virtual backgrounds was to use an image of the (real) background from a colleague’s home office. Beyond simple backgroundsīut you know I’m not going to be satisfied with a simple holiday snap background, right?
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Several of our coffee room chats were like virtual world tours of colleagues’ previous travel destinations. But in a social context it can create some great conversation-starters when attendees use vacation photos or other interesting material as their backgrounds. This feature is useful in a business context because it can help to remove distractions, and help other attendees to focus on a presenter for example, a presenter may replace their background with a company logo.
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This social use of the technology – a use-case which has also seen rapid global uptake for virtual pub quizzes, virtual choirs, virtual religious gatherings, and so on – where most attendees are using webcams and aren’t being distracted by having to have an actual business meeting, is the perfect opportunity to play with the virtual background feature of some online meeting platforms.Ī virtual background is a modification to the user’s webcam video stream where the software separates the foreground (the user) and the background, and allows the background to be replaced by a static image (or in some cases a video or other dynamic content). When the entire Citrix Cambridge team started working from home 4 weeks ago, we setup twice-daily virtual coffee rooms, using online meeting tools, to help keep staff connected. With the huge increase in working-from-home during the current pandemic, use of online meeting platforms has increased significantly.
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