Microsoft officially introduced animated Teams backgrounds in May 2023, though they’re still only available to a handful of users. Like many new features on Teams, such as avatars and spatial audio, these backgrounds help users create more immersive collaborative experiences.
With animated Teams backgrounds, you can immerse yourself in a dynamic world during meetings, express yourself to colleagues, and spice up conferencing sessions.
Despite rising “return to office” mandates, many companies are searching for ways to make video meetings more fun and engaging as the world continues to embrace hybrid and remote work.
While an animated background might not add much to the value of your professional conversation, it can make a virtual interaction feel more exciting.
Here’s how you can enable animated Teams backgrounds for your meetings.
Getting Started: Prerequisites
Although animated backgrounds have been available from competitors like Zoom for a while, they’re only beginning to appear on Teams. Currently, the feature is available to companies using the latest version of Teams public preview.
Additionally, it’s worth noting Microsoft only offers four virtual backgrounds to choose from, though there’s a good chance there’ll be more diversity in the years to come.
Before exploring dynamic backgrounds, you’ll need to ensure you’re part of the “Teams Public Preview” program. You can do this by signing into the Microsoft Teams admin center. From there, select “Show Teams Preview features” and decide whether you want to enable preview features for your entire organization or just select users.
Admins can also allow individual users to choose whether to “opt-in” to use certain features.
Notably, only “pre-defined” backgrounds offered by Microsoft are supported. Plus, users can only leverage animated Teams backgrounds in the Windows or MacOS Teams client. Animated scenes aren’t available on low-end devices, requiring at least 8GB of RAM.
Microsoft also notes that using video filters on a system with a high workload could slow down the performance of background animations.
How to Enable Teams Animated Backgrounds
After an admin enables preview features for all Teams users and ensures virtual backgrounds are accessible for tenants, using animated backgrounds is simple. However, it’s a good idea to double-check you’re using the latest version of Teams before you dive in.
You can check your app is up to date by clicking on the three dots (settings) next to the profile icon on your Teams app. Click the “Check for Update” option to ensure you have the latest version.
If everything is up to date, users can choose whether they want to apply Teams animated backgrounds before starting a meeting or during a conversation. Before heading into a meeting, you can see animated scenes on the “pre-join” screen for a video conference. Select “Effects and Avatars” and then “Video Effects” to select an animated background.
During a meeting, click the “More” button in the Teams app, then “Effects and Avatars.” From there, you’ll be able to see and use the same selection of dynamic backgrounds.
