During the start of the pandemic, Zoom became one of the popular video conferencing applications that people turned to for holding meetings.
This was after wide spread lockdowns and working from home directives in different countries.
Zoom enabled people to work from anywhere and some of the features that it has are virtual background, calendar integration, waiting room, multishare, personal meeting room and touch-up my appearance.
The touch-up my appearance feature, when enabled provides a soft focus for your entire screen.
It makes you look professional and polished with little to no prep time. For the Multishare feature, it makes real time collaboration easier than ever when multiple people can share their screens at the same time.
For those who have two monitors, they can enable the dual monitors’ option in their Zoom settings to view the most recently shared screens side by side.
With the virtual background feature, you are able to set a new background in a meeting to hide clutter, eliminate distractions or highlight branding.
To set a background, you go to settings then click on virtual background.
In addition to these features, Zoom has decided to add more features. They have recently added a new emoji, a vanishing pen and more features to your video calls.
These new features aim at boosting communication and making it easier to present and manage people on the platform.
There will be an emoji option for meeting reactions. It will have about 40 emoji reactions as opposed to the current six and you can also be able to choose a skin tone for your emojis.
This is similar to the emojis that we use on WhatsApp where one can choose a skin tone. If you use Zoom at your workplace, the administrators and account owners will need to enable the full emoji set which will require a one-time download.
The vanishing pen is one of the new features added on this platform. It lets you highlight texts or objects when sharing your screen.
Instead of you having to go back to erase or undo those highlights, they will fade overtime thus you can keep on presenting uninterrupted.
For those who prefer to use Zoom through their tablet, new whiteboard auto-shapes will let you draw straight lines, perfect circles and other shapes as you are white boarding during meetings.
If you have the Facebook Portal TV, it enables you to access the Zoom app through that screen. For the Zoom account owners or administrators, they can add a user’s manager to appear on their Zoom profile.
With the rise of Zoom, there also came concepts such as Zoom fatigue or exhaustion of spending hours on video chat and Zoom anxiety the stress that can come along with these meetings. BY THE STAR