Now that many of us have gotten used to remote work and distance learning, it’s up to us to present ourselves in a fun and colorful way every time we log into a meeting. Google Meet offers a ton of features for communicating with your friends and colleagues, but can you add visual effects to your background to hide the things you don’t want others to see? That’s what we’re here to talk about.
How to: Change your background in Google Meet
Technically, no! Google Meet doesn’t let you apply backgrounds to your video feed by default. That’s because there’s no option in Google Meet to customize the background of your camera feed, other than blurring it.
Unlike Google Meet, both Zoom and Microsoft Teams allow users to set custom backgrounds. Zoom has a virtual background option that allows users to replace their own background with other images available in the app or from their own library. Teams recently rolled out a “Background Effects” feature that lets you select images as new backgrounds.
Yes. While Google Meet doesn’t currently let you add custom backgrounds, you can still do so natively with a Chrome extension: Visual Effects. You can install this extension like any other Google Chrome extension made for Google Meet that extends the capabilities of the video conferencing service.
