Zoom has announced Immersive View, a new feature for its popular conference call platform

This is a fun new feature for Zoom and a clear response to a feature very similar to Microsoft Teams' Together Mode, which debuted last summer auditorium

Zoom emerged as the leading virtual meeting application during the COVID-19 pandemic, despite being plagued by security issues Since then, other companies like Microsoft, which offers Teams, and Google, which offers virtual meetings, have fought back against Zoom, so it will be interesting to see how the company plays catch-up against the features introduced by its competitors

Zoom initially pitched Immersive View last October, a few months after the launch of Together Mode Free and individual Zoom users, at least those using Zoom 563 or later, should see an option to enable Immersive View in the upper right corner of their Zoom client during meetings

Once Immersive View is enabled, the option to manually or automatically place up to 25 meeting participants on one shared virtual background will appear If there are more participants than slots in the virtual background, the remaining participants will be displayed in a thin strip of thumbnail-sized video along the top of the screen

Interestingly, hosts have the authority to create their own virtual backgrounds or use their own videos as virtual backgrounds

This comes a few days after Zoom got a bunch of killer upgrades with a big patch, including extended emoji support for reactions and a bunch of updates to make using Zoom on mobile devices easier and more intuitive

If you're planning to hop back into Zoom to try out the new features and need a basic quick refresher, check out our guides on how to set up a Zoom meeting and how to change your Zoom background Your personal Zoom background may also appear in your Immersive View setup If you need a new one, check out our list of free Zoom backgrounds