Immersive View

I've messed with it a bit, also created a custom view of a recognizable conference room on campus.  At the moment, I consider it little more than a party trick for a couple reasons.

• You can't save your layout.  This means you have to resize/reposition every single video feed every time you use it.
• It expects everyone's head to be the same size.  Even the pre-made classroom layout has all the student's heads the same size, as if they were all the same distance from the professor.  This works on a 2D screen, but to re-create this in real life, you'd need desks literally stacked on top of each other.  When I attempted to use a picture of a real room with 3 rows of chairs, I could only use the 1st & 2nd rows, because I could not shrink the video feeds small enough to make the 3rd row look realistic.

I'm excited for this feature to develop with time.  But until we can actually save our custom layouts, it's not super usable.

Thank you for the feedback.  I agree that it needs time development for classroom deployment.  I use it for my weekly team meetings just to break the monotony. I was hoping to use it for easy layouts for guest speakers as to not have to teach program assistants OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) on top of Canvas, and Zoom every few years.  I can hold my own with Zoom, but layouts and connecting OBS to Zoom is another story all together. 

I'm a big fan of OBS.  I use it to add my own lower 3rds (another feature I hope Zoom is adding soon).  The integration has become a lot easier now that they added a built-in Virtual Webcam feature and you don't have to install a separate plug in.

OBS is powerful and hands down the best way to do lower 3rds right now, so yes I hope Zoom is adding soon. I will check out the new built-in Virtual Webcam feature.  Is the audio still tricky?

I've never actually gotten audio out of OBS beyond recording.  I would imagine you'd need to install an internal audio bus like Soundflower for Mac, route OBS's audio in there, and then set Zoom's audio input to Soundflower as well.  But I use completely different devices for audio, so I've never needed OBS to do anything in that realm, anyway.

Hi @jjones ! You have some responses to your discussion worth noting. Have any of these answered your question? If so, don’t forget to mark the reply as an accepted solution! 

I don't have a problem with loading my custom layout every time we have meetings, but I see there is big issue when using Immersive View and my custom layout. Zoom automatically applies a filter to remove the background on each participant using video . We don't want Zoom to make our video cams to be rounded or to guess we all have green screens. We just want the regular rectangular full aspect ratio (16:9) to normally show instead of messing up with everyone's cams. So then it is hard to position each video cam on my custom layout. Some participants' cams show invisible because of this automatic filter. There has to be a preference setting for choosing not to get this automatic video filter.

I just started trying out Immersive View this week. I am facilitating a discussion and debrief of a training exercise tomorrow and am looking forward to trying it out with 14 participants.

Great conversation. I learned quite a few tips and tricks from this thread. Thank you. 

I will be testing the immersive background on a meeting of 30 people this week.

I'll tell you how it goes, but I would love to hear how it worked for others.