Replace your background in Microsoft Teams
What’s changing
You can now replace your background with an image when using Microsoft Teams. You can either use Microsoft's hand-picked images, which include office spaces, landscapes, and abstract backgrounds, or upload your own image.
Unlike with IU's license for Google Meet, users may upload their own images to use as custom backgrounds.
How to change your background
INSTRUCTIONS:
- To update your background before joining or starting a Teams meeting, navigate to Background effects .
- If you're already in the middle of a video chat, go to the bottom of the screen and click or tap the three dots to go to your Meeting controls. Select More actions > Show background effects.
- Either select Blur to blur your background, or choose from the available images to replace it. You can even create your own images, upload them to Teams, and then select them as a background image for your video chats. Just select Add new.
- You'll be able to preview your background to see how it looks. If you like it, hit Apply. That's it!
You can view the official instructions from Microsoft here:
Important Notes From IU Staff
Caution About System Performance After Background Changes
- The ability to change the background works by "drawing" an image of you into a canvas HTML element, and overlaying it on top of the background image. This is done for each frame of the video (e.g., up to 30fps). As you might imagine, the ability to render a facsimile of your image at dozens of millions of pixels per second takes tremendous processing power. If you feel that your computer is acting sluggish after enabling the custom background, you might want to try to disable it for a few minutes and see if it improves your system's performance.
- Similarly, the ability to upload the rendered image of you with the custom background results in significantly larger amounts of data that needs to be uploaded to Google's servers. Additionally, if all of the participants
enables this feature and you are showing each of their images (e.g., via Tile View), then this would likewise impact your Internet connection's download speeds.
- To check on the quality of your bandwidth connection, please use the Speedtest Tool within Moodle. Unlike other similar web applications, the Speedtest Tool found in Moodle tests your connection directly against Google's servers, which will provide a more accurate reflection of your experiences during Google Meet sessions.