Microsoft Teams will allow organizations to brand their meetings with the frosted glass background effect

Microsoft Teams has introduced a new feature that enhances the look and feel of virtual meetings and calls – the frosted glass background effect. This feature is designed to allow Microsoft Teams users to brand their company’s meetings and calls professionally and visually appealingly, a capability that the Redmond-based tech giant released a while ago.

The feature allows you to upload a transparent PNG background image, which Teams then converts into a frosted glass background. You can manually upload individual frosted glass backgrounds.

If you’re a Teams Premium admin, you can also upload frosted glass backgrounds for your organization and assign those backgrounds to different teams based on customization policies.

For the best video appearance, Microsoft suggests using an image without transparency. Non-transparent backgrounds will fully replace your actual background. This may look a little jarring to the eye if the lighting conditions in the actual background differ significantly from the lighting conditions in the background replacement. The frosted glass, by contrast, creates a more natural look where the person and background share lighting conditions.

This effect is reminiscent of the corner office with a frosted glass wall. Meeting participants can turn on the “adjust brightness” filter in Teams video settings to further enhance this effect. You can choose different frosted glass backgrounds for other teams within your organization.

This level of customization allows each team to have a unique identity while maintaining a cohesive overall brand.

To ensure consistency across all Teams calls, Teams admins can enforce the use of specific background effects by marking a background as required in the Teams Admin Center.

Here’s what you need to keep in mind if you want to brand your Teams meetings with the frosted glass background effect , according to Microsoft:

• Resolution: Use 1920×1080 pixels for a high-quality background.
• Avoid full opacity: Colored content, such as logos, looks best with a little transparency. Microsoft recommends 75% opacity.
• Gaussian blur: A Gaussian blur of radius 2 works well to simulate a bit of depth of field in the scene.
• Stencil mid-gray foreground: For grayscale PNG with transparency, Microsoft recommends having the full image in mid-gray (value 128) so that the transparency pattern is visible on both light and dark backgrounds.

You can read more about it in this blog post.