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Peripheral: What is the benefit of halving these artificial backgrounds? Apart from „it’s fun“, which wears off after about a minute? In my experience (Zoom Mee

Peripheral: What is the benefit of halving these artificial backgrounds? Apart from „it’s fun“, which wears off after about a minute? In my experience (Zoom Meetings), there’s blurring/artefacts around the edge of the head and the image quality seems to suffer as well. I had a meeting where one participant uses an actual green screen, and the difference was remarkable, with none of the issues above.

onion2k 6y ago
There are two parts to background matting. The first is removing the existing background and the second is replacing it with something else. Removing the background improves the focus on the foreground - people watching can see you better and they'll listen more closely because they're not distracted by what's behind you. The second part, replacing the background with something else, might be done because you don't want people to see where you are, or because you want to overlay your foreground video on a presentation. Being able to pretend you're on a holodeck or a desert island is a trivial use of the tech.
jlokier 6y ago
Some people feel the need to hide their shitty apartment. I've seen someone advised that the background on their webcam makes them "look poor", where the concern was that looking poor is a (perverse) impediment to getting paid work, but they can't exactly move, especially under lockdown. It may be better to use a calm artificial background in that case. See also people doing online-conference presentations and Youtube videos. I've seen quite a few of those are using virtual backgrounds. Perhaps for the same reason - thousands of people may see the video, and some people, having made the effort to put on a nice suit/makeup/etc, get a haircut, and look their best, don't want thousands of people to see what their not so nice home looks like behind it.

onion2k 6y ago

There are two parts to background matting. The first is removing the existing background and the second is replacing it with something else. Removing the background improves the focus on the foreground - people watching can see you better and they'll listen more closely because they're not distracted by what's behind you. The second part, replacing the background with something else, might be done because you don't want people to see where you are, or because you want to overlay your foreground video on a presentation. Being able to pretend you're on a holodeck or a desert island is a trivial use of the tech.

jlokier 6y ago

Some people feel the need to hide their shitty apartment. I've seen someone advised that the background on their webcam makes them "look poor", where the concern was that looking poor is a (perverse) impediment to getting paid work, but they can't exactly move, especially under lockdown. It may be better to use a calm artificial background in that case. See also people doing online-conference presentations and Youtube videos. I've seen quite a few of those are using virtual backgrounds. Perhaps for the same reason - thousands of people may see the video, and some people, having made the effort to put on a nice suit/makeup/etc, get a haircut, and look their best, don't want thousands of people to see what their not so nice home looks like behind it.