Virtual Backgrounds—Your Setting Can Create Pure Laughs to Serious Business
Goals: Change your background for fun or for business.
Do you want to be in a beautiful office overlooking the ocean? Do you want to be on the site of your favorite TV show? Do you want to clean up your office without doing the hard work or using a hard-to-set-up green screen?
One of the fastest ways to clean up or improve your background is with virtual backgrounds.
A virtual background takes any picture or video and changes everything around your head and body to that new background.
If you have a computer that is powerful enough, you can change your background right now. If you have an older computer or want to get best results, you can use a green screen or a large green mat behind you, like what’s used in movies. The green screen allows the computer to easily replace the green with your virtual background.
Tracy Stuckrath, chief food officer at Thrive! Meetings & Events, and I were discussing her upcoming presentation and we were talking about the problem that when you share your slides, your video becomes one sixteenth the size of a full-screen video, which we agreed was non-engaging.
We came up with the idea of using virtual backdrops for her slides. She shifted her content to one side and positioned herself on the other side. This allowed her to keep her video size at 100% and present her content with a beautiful image backdrop. This presentation was conducive to this strategy as she had five key points.
This is the first time I have seen virtual backgrounds used for presentations; look for video platforms to catch on and offer applications such as PowerPoint to be used for your virtual background. Zoom released this feature in August 2020.
Until then, you can create a slide deck in programs like PowerPoint and use the File->Save a Copy feature. Select PNG format and save and every slide will be saved as a graphic image that can be used as a virtual background.
You can also create videos and install each one as a virtual background and change them during your presentation.
Click play to see an example of a picture and video virtual background.
Want to learn more?
Click to register for the Engaging Virtual Meetings Conference, every year in October.
http://engagingvirtualmeetings.com/conference
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