Last fall Google added options for blurring your background in Google Meet and using your own pictures as backgrounds in Google Meet. This week another background option was added to Google Meet.
You can now use videos as virtual backgrounds in Google Meet. Right now the options are limited to just videos provided by Google. Hopefully, more options including uploading your own videos will be added in the future. The current video background options provided by Google are “classroom,” “party,” and “forest.”
Applications for Education
This update isn’t going to change the way that any of us use Google Meet for online instruction. That said, it is nice to have an option to break-up the routine of Google Meet meetings with a fun background choice. In the future, if Google allows us to upload our own videos to use as backgrounds we could us those videos in a virtual green screen environment in which the video plays behind us while we talk about what’s displayed. I’m picturing that working much like the animated green screen backgrounds used by television meteorologists on morning news shows.
For those who haven’t tried virtual backgrounds or blurred backgrounds in Google Meet, in the video below I demonstrate how to use both of those features.
