Virtual backgrounds are becoming essential utilities within video calls, allowing users to eliminate annoying or troublesome backgrounds without physical modifications. This means by using specialized background images; you can change the appearance of your existing background within your requirements. Do you also need a good video call background? This article discusses the top 5 background options, including implementing a background in a video call.
Why is Video Call Background Important?
To improve your video call experience, adding a virtual background is a perfect way to proceed. After all, a virtual background removes all the hassles of solving problems in your real-life location. However, there are many other reasons why video call background is essential, and a few of them are the following:
- Privacy
During a video call, your entire background is exposed to people who may risk your privacy, as all your private stuff and essential information are visible. That’s where the virtual background comes into play to keep your privacy intact.
- No Distractions
The most common problem within a video call is when people constantly move around in your background. Meanwhile, giving a serious distraction to your all-important meetings, conferences, or interviews. Hence, virtual backgrounds are a perfect assisting tool in this regard.
- Professional Looks
It’s common to have a non-professional background for your most professional job interview, and for a good first impression, your background must be good enough to engage the interviewer. Henceforth, a virtual background with an office-like template can help you in this regard.
- Entertainment
The virtual background can significantly improve your entertainment levels with funny, exciting, and creative backgrounds during fun video calls with friends or colleagues. The Benefits of a Good Video Call Background.
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The Benefits of a Good Video Call Background
Whether it’s about online academic presentations, international job interviews, or even work-from-home scenarios, background for video calls is a great assistance to overcome the challenges of annoying background. A good video call background brings the following benefits:
- Flexibility
There will always be flexibility regarding the environment and location within an excellent virtual background. Thus, the users can set the appearance of the background as per their needs without the issues of locational challenges.
- Branding
Having an impressive background with your brand’s logo or ad can be a great branding strategy for promoting your business. This is also an excellent technique for marketing that improves your brand awareness.
- Comfortable Environment
With a video call background, participants can feel relaxed and focus more on their virtual meeting rather than solving issues of troublesome background with unnecessary distractions.
- Customization
Any good video call background would be easier to customize per the user’s personality, hobbies, interests, or lifestyle. The aim would be to make them feel more comfortable and adjusted to the environment.
Best 5 Video Call Backgrounds for Online Meetings
When you’re finally moving further to download a video call background for yourself, you’ll be amazed to see that the internet is overloaded with many options. Making it difficult to choose and decide the right video call background for yourself. Here you’ll find 5 best categories to change the background in a video call:
- Bookshelf Background
Giving an impression of a professional library-like environment, this virtual background is ideal for giving interviews or presentations. For students, this background perfectly aligns with their academic atmosphere, similar to in schools, colleges, and universities, thus making them feel like they are in their academic institutions.
A sense of professionalism is conveyed within this background, making the evaluator think as if the student is super focused on studies and academic endeavors.
- Outdoor Background
Organize your family video call meetings within a serene and calming environment, thanks to this specialized outdoor background that is picturesque from Key West, Florida. Thus, make your family virtual hangouts unique while having this background present in your video call.
Furthermore, if your house is messy, this background for video calls would be a great partner for you, as it comprises stunning furniture with the scenery in the back.
- Production Studio
If you’re involved in music production and had to turn a face-to-face hangout into an important virtual meeting, the production studio background is an ideal solution. This video call background incorporates a complete music production studio that will amaze the person on the video call while watching your interest in music.
With extra sound system support, pleasant lighting, and a comfortable environment, this background is ideal for any music or audio enthusiast.
- Office Room
With an office room, schedule your business meetings while sitting in the comfort of your home. After all, this video call background leverages a unique yet specialized office-based layout that gives the perception that you’re in the office. You are ultimately creating a positive impact on your business meeting that can give you the deal you want.
Moreover, this background for video calls is also ideal for an employee who is not physically present in the meeting but has virtually joined to create similar surroundings.
- Gradient Black Background
Since the dark mode isn’t possible in video calls, your midnight virtual hangouts with friends could be disturbed by lighting issues. For this purpose, use a black gradient background in your video calls that will not affect your eyes and allow you to have fun, joy, and entertainment with friends. You can also use this background for virtual meetings during daylight if needed.
How to Implement Background for Video Calls
The ZEGOCLOUD Express-Video SDK is a tool that allows developers to easily add video calling and live video streaming functionality to a range of applications, including features like video call backgrounds. This functionality can be used for various purposes, such as one-on-one and group video calls, online education, entertainment, live streaming, and more.
There are several benefits to using ZEGOCLOUD’s Express Video SDK in your video call applications. Some of the standout advantages include the following:
1. High concurrency
One of the main advantages of using ZEGOCLOUD Express Video SDK is its ability to support high concurrency. This means it can handle many users simultaneously without experiencing any slowdown or performance issues. This is particularly useful for applications that support a high volume of users, such as those used for online education or live-streaming entertainment.
2. Ultra-low latency
Another critical benefit of ZEGOCLOUD Express Video SDK is its ultra-low latency. This means there is minimal delay between when an action is performed and when it is displayed on the screen. This is important for ensuring a smooth and seamless user experience, especially in real-time applications such as video calls.
3. Interactive video features
ZEGOCLOUD Express Video SDK allows developers to easily add interactive features to their video applications. For example, they can enable users to share their screens, draw on a shared whiteboard, or use virtual backgrounds during a video call. These features can enhance the overall user experience and make it more engaging and interactive.
To use the Express-Video SDK, developers must follow four steps to connect their applications to the ZEGOCLOUD streaming platform. This platform is designed to deliver high-quality, ultra-low latency, and interactive live video to end users across all platforms, with support for handling large numbers of users concurrently. This ensures that users have the best possible experience with live video.
Steps to Change Video Call Background
To use ZEGOCLOUD and its Express Video SDK for video call backgrounds, you will need a few things:
- A ZEGOCLOUD developer account – Sign up here.
- A device with an active internet connection and audio and video capabilities.
- Some familiarity with web development.
Integrating ZEGOCLOUD’s Express Video SDK into your project to change the background for video calls is a straightforward process. Here’s how you can do it:
- Create a new project with an
index.html,index.css, andindex.jsfile. The folder structure should look something like this:
├── index.html
├── js
│ └── index.js
└── css
└── index.css
2. Copy the following code to the index.html file:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Zego RTC Video Call</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="./css/index.css">
</head>
<body>
<h1>
Zego RTC Video Call
</h1>
<h4>Local video</h4>
<video id="local-video" autoplay muted playsinline controls></video>
<h4>Remote video</h4>
<video id="remote-video" autoplay muted playsinline controls></video>
<script src="./js/index.js"></script>
</body>
</html>3. Copy the following code to the index.css file:
*{
font-family: sans-serif;
}
h1,h4{
text-align: center;
}
video {
width: 300px;
height: auto;
}
#local-video{
position: relative;
margin: 0 auto;
display: block;
}
#remote-video{
display: flex;
height: auto;
margin: auto;
position: relative !important;
}- Run and test your project on a local web server using the live-server extension. If you don’t have it installed, run the command
npm i live-server -gto install it. - Install the Express Video SDK into your project by running the command
npm i zego-express-engine-webrtcto install the dependencies.
Implementation steps
To change the background during a video call using the ZEGOCLOUD video call SDK, you will need to use the setVideoBackground method of the ZegoExpressEngine class. This method allows you to specify an image or a video file as the background to be displayed during the call.
Here’s an example of how you can use this method in your code:
import { ZegoExpressEngine } from 'zego-express-engine';
// Initialize the ZegoExpressEngine object
const engine = new ZegoExpressEngine();
// Set the background image or video file
engine.setVideoBackground('path/to/image/or/video.jpg');You can also specify a callback function as the second argument to the setVideoBackground method, which will be called when the background has been set successfully.
engine.setVideoBackground('path/to/image/or/video.jpg', function() {
console.log('Background set successfully');
});Note that the setVideoBackground the method only works when the local user uses a camera that does not support hardware video encoding. If the local user’s camera does support hardware video encoding, the background will not be displayed.
Run a demo
Looking to create an audio call application? You can download a sample demo source code from this article to get started. If you have more advanced requirements, such as streaming mix, noise reduction, censorship, and more, consider using the ZEGOCLOUD Core SDK.
Conclusion
Having a faulty or disturbing background is a common thing that can happen to anyone. However, you should not let your essential video calls be a victim of these background issues. Thus, use backgrounds for video calls to help create a customized background appearance, irrespective of location.
Meanwhile, this article has the best suggestions if you’re looking for the best 5 video call background. While in order to implement a video call background in an application, use ZEGOCLOUD Video Call API & SDK for this task.
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