The Zoom client does a pretty good job of distinguishing my navy-blue sweatshirt from the dark background, too. Zoom will arrange your available backgrounds beneath the video window. Zoom also recommends that you don’t wear clothes that are the same color as your background. The background feature isn’t perfect: The background sometimes obscured my collar, and Zoom isn’t always friendly to those who talk with their hands. But on my test machine-the recent Surface Pro 7-I certainly didn’t need one. (As you might expect, video files have a small camcorder icon in the corner.)Īs you can see from the screenshots, there is an option to enable a green screen, if you have one. But if you click one of the images below your video window, you should see what’s behind you replaced with either a static image (the Golden Gate Bridge is a favorite) or else a slowly looping video background, like the northern lights or Zoom’s beach scene. By default, Zoom turns on your webcam, and you should see what others in your chat will see: you, and your background.

This opens up a wealth of options, but the relevant one for us is the Virtual Background option.

The first thing to do is to click the Zoom Settings gear in the upper right-hand corner. When the Zoom main screen opens up, you’ll see the Zoom main page. Virtual backgrounds are also available for iOS (with an iPhone 8, 8+, or X, or an iPad Pro and the 5th and 6th-gen iPads) but support for Android isn’t listed. This is all simple enough that it will either work, or it won’t. If you don’t know what you have, don’t worry.

A PC with a supported microprocessor: a quad-core 6th-gen Core i5 (except a U-series chip) a quad-core 4th-gen Core i7 or any 3GHz processor with 8 cores or more.

An up-to-date Zoom app running on Windows 7, 8, or 10.

Zoom has a rather complex list of minimum requirements that you’ll need to enable custom backgrounds, but here’s what they boil down to: That changed last year, when the Zoom desktop app became smart enough to distinguish you from the objects behind you. Custom backgrounds don’t seem to work on the Zoom web client, though. Historically, Zoom required a “green screen” to enable custom backgrounds-yes, the literal green backdrop traditionally used by movies to enable a canvas for computer-generated special effects.

Zoom background funny images