Zoom Video Communications has announced a more engaging and collaborative way to meet enabling hosts to arrange video participants and webinar panelists into a single virtual background, bringing people together in one scene to connect and collaborate in a cohesive virtual meeting space.
Announced at Zoomtopia 2020, Immersive View creates the feeling of being in a classroom, a boardroom, a conference auditorium, or designated place to catch up with friends, adding up to 25 participants in one fun and consistent meting environment.
Meeting and webinar hosts can select the Zoom immersive view in the same way as they would select the Speaker or Gallery View. By enabling “Immersive View”, hosts will have the option to automatically or manually place participants in a virtual scene of their choosing. Hosts can also easily move participants around that scene and even resize a participant’s image for a more natural experience.
Additionally, hosts can easily change the scene or revert back to Speaker or Gallery View at any time. Zoom provides a few scenes, but you can also upload your own. Hosts can even use their own video as an Immersive View scene, bringing participants into their personal virtual environment.
Some of the features of Immersive View are:
Available for Windows and MacOS desktop clients, Immersive View is enabled by default for all individual Free and single Pro accounts using Zoom 5.6.3 or higher, and can be enabled via the web portal for all other account types . For more information on how to enable Immersive View for users or groups in your account, visit the support information .
What if some participants are on older versions of Zoom?
When Immersive View is enabled, those on Zoom desktop and mobile apps that do not support Immersive View will continue to see other meeting participants in either Gallery View or Speaker View, just with a simple black background. Others in the meeting will still view these unsupported participants in the Immersive View scene with their original backgrounds.
Our current scenes can accommodate up to 25 participants in a scene, with various layouts for smaller groups. A number on each scene tile indicates how many people it can accommodate. We recommend deploying a scene that aligns with the meeting size.
Up to 25 participants can interact in a scene, with various layouts for smaller groups. Additional participants are displayed in a thumbnail strip at the top of the scene.
You still have your available meeting capacity and can host as many participants as you normally would. Another view like Gallery View is recommended for larger meetings.
The Immersive View will end and be replaced by the shared screen. When sharing stops, the Immersive View will begin again with the same positions as before.
When using Immersive View in a webinar, the host and panelists will be placed together onto the virtual background, while webinar attendees view the scene.
Will the Immersive View show up in meeting recordings?
Recording of Immersive View is not yet supported. Cloud and local recordings will appear as Gallery or Speaker View, depending on cloud recording settings or which was used before Immersive View is started for local recordings.