Zoom Introduces Animal Avatars For Virtual Meetings

Synopsis – This new feature has been brought to inject fun into the boring daily meetings and lighten up the mood. Also according to Zoom, “Avatars replace your look with a virtual animal that matches your head motions and facial expressions.”

Two years of the pandemic has made half of the population rely on the virtual world. People have stopped meeting in person but like to be a bit more dramatic over video calls and the same has affected their professional life. The major change of Work From Home and the advent of Zoom calls have penetrated the lifestyle. 

It has become a basic way to interact with your team members and to know them during these times. Although many offices have resumed work from office culture, there are many offices where employees are still working from home, and zoom meetings at that time can become a bit boring. Therefore, in order to get rid of that boredom Zoom has introduced a new feature of ‘Avatars’ to make the platform more interesting.

The newly launched feature of Avatars has been integrated into the boring Zoom platform. Sometimes it also becomes very hard to keep the same expressions all the time. Thus, in order to save people from this, the use of new Avatars can be done, which will replace their faces and put a face of a virtual character, that will imitate their expression making the conversation exciting. This new feature has been brought to inject fun into the boring daily meetings and lighten up the mood. Also according to Zoom, 

“Avatars replace your look with a virtual animal that matches your head motions and facial expressions.”

The main motive of introducing this feature is to remove the monotonousness of Zoom meetings around the globe where people are dependent upon online webinars and conferences. However, this feature is not limited to offices only, but also for children who are attending schools from home along with the teachers too. Zoom also claims,

“Whether you’re at home, in the workplace, or the classroom his engaging new tool makes it easy to infuse fun into your meets and webinars and sweeten the atmosphere.” 

Talking about the privacy concern this technology does not store your picture, but when you turn on your Avatar during a Zoom call or meeting then the technology uses your device camera and detects your face on the screen and replaces it with the selected avatar. Besides this, the new feature does not use face recognition thus, does not reveals your identity. However, for keeping the identity of the user safe Zoom has provided animal avatars, including cows, dogs, cats, foxes, bears, and raccoons. 

So in order to get started with the Avatars in Zoom, these are the following steps that can be followed:

1. Open your webcam and enable the video option
2. Click on the ‘Stop Video’ option by clicking on the meeting toolbar and open the video option
3. Now select the Video Filter Option or Virtual Background
4. That’s it! Now you can select your avatar from the list of options available 

The avatar is not permanent, you can change the same by again visiting the list of avatars tab, and selecting a new one. Also, if you want to remove the avatar, just select the ‘None’ option from the tab. Apart from this, another way of removing the same is by clicking on ‘Turn off avatar’ present on the self-view tile in a meeting or the ‘Stop Video’ option.