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About this lesson

Maintain privacy by adding a background or blur effect to disguise your environment. 

Quick reference

Background Effects

Maintain privacy by adding a Background Effect or Blur. 

When to use

We use Background Effects to disguise our background when in a video meeting. 

Instructions

Working from home has increased dramatically over the last couple of years. Our home working environment has never been exposed as much as it is currently.

To maintain a sense of privacy, we can use Background Effects to disguise our environment when on a video call. 

We can apply a Background Effect before entering the meeting or when we are in the meeting. 

Apply a Background Effect (Before Joining)

  • Click the Meet now button. 
  • Toggle on the Camera. 
  • Click Background Effects. 
  • Choose a background from the gallery. 
  • Click Apply. 
Apply a Blur

We can apply a blurred background instead of a background image. Blurring our background will simply blue out our environment making it difficult to see a messy room for example. 

  • From Background Effects, click Blur. 
  • Click Apply. 

Apply or Change Background Effect (In Meeting)

We can select a different background effect when we are in the meeting. 

  • Click the More button. 
  • Click Apply background effects. 
  • Choose a background from the gallery. 
  • Click Apply. 

Hints & tips

  • We can upload and use our own image as a background effect by clicking the Add new button. 
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  • 00:04 With so many people working from home these days,
  • 00:07 our home environment has never been more exposed than it is right now.
  • 00:12 Whenever you join an online meeting, particularly if you have your camera
  • 00:16 turned on, everybody in that meeting can see whatever is going on behind you.
  • 00:21 And there have been many well reported hilarious cases of messy rooms,
  • 00:26 children running in and out, and maybe even pets causing chaos.
  • 00:32 So in order to protect our privacy just a little bit, we have background
  • 00:37 filters that we can use to effectively disguise whatever is behind us.
  • 00:43 So, let's jump into a quick meeting and see how we can do this.
  • 00:47 Now I'm just going to click the Meet button and
  • 00:51 on this first window that pops up, I can choose a background filter.
  • 00:55 Now in order for this option to be active, you need to have your camera turned on.
  • 01:00 So, I'm going to turn mine on.
  • 01:02 And that looks very strange.
  • 01:04 You can see my microphone, you can see my green screen behind and
  • 01:08 even a little bit of my fancy floral wallpaper.
  • 01:12 And maybe I just don't want you guys to be able to see that.
  • 01:15 So what I can do here is add a background filter.
  • 01:20 And this is going to open up a little gallery in a pane on the right hand side.
  • 01:24 Now what I could do here is choose one of these fancy backgrounds.
  • 01:28 So what about something like that?
  • 01:31 So hopefully you get the idea, you can no longer see my background,
  • 01:35 it's been replaced with an image.
  • 01:37 So there's loads of these fun backgrounds that you can choose.
  • 01:41 You can choose things that look more like an office.
  • 01:44 Or you could inject some fun and have something that looks like that.
  • 01:48 So which one of these you choose is entirely up to you.
  • 01:52 But the whole point of them is really just to camouflage your background and
  • 01:57 maintain an aspect of privacy when you're on a video call.
  • 02:01 Now if these fancy backgrounds aren't really your thing,
  • 02:04 what you could do as an alternative is you could blur your background instead.
  • 02:08 Notice right at the top we have a blur option.
  • 02:11 So if I choose that, you can sort of see my background but it is blurred out.
  • 02:16 So this works well if you have something like a messy room behind you,
  • 02:20 this works quite well.
  • 02:21 So, I could choose one of these before I go into the meeting.
  • 02:25 And I think I'm going to switch this to contemporary office, that's pretty funky.
  • 02:30 Also notice at the top here we have an Add New link.
  • 02:33 So if you do want to use your own image as a background,
  • 02:36 you could upload it from here.
  • 02:38 Now I'm not going to do that, I'm just going to click on Join Now.
  • 02:42 Now I'm not going to add any participants at this stage,
  • 02:45 because this is really just to showcase these backgrounds.
  • 02:48 So you're getting a very large version of me at the moment.
  • 02:52 Now if I decide once I'm in the meeting that I want to change this background, I
  • 02:57 can do that by going into More and we have Apply background effects in this menu.
  • 03:03 So I can jump back into here and then just choose something else.
  • 03:08 So that is it for background effects.
  • 03:10 Fairly straightforward, fairly simple.
  • 03:12 Use them whenever you want to protect your privacy.

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