ChromeOS may step up to add background blur and other camera effects for video conferencing
Video conferencingis a big deal, period. Never mind the ongoing ordeal that we’re still living, video conferencing would have gone big one way or another. So much so, a number of chat clients including Google Meet have integrated cloud-powered background blurring effects for the many of us that are stuck in our messy, unpresentable bedrooms. For Chromebook owners, though, you might be getting more blur for your buck soon with OS-level capabilities.
9to5Googlehas marked down a rather self-explanatory potential feature flag in the Chromium Gerrit called#vc-background-blurthat’s been in the works for a while. Digging deeper, the feature could actually be one of multiple effects in the works — including something calledPortrait Relighting— as made possible by something that is either called or at least involves theEffectsStreamManipulator. EffectsStreamManipulator was described to be “extensively tested” on ChromeOS boards running with Intel Tiger Lake and Alder Lake chips (11th- and 12th-gen Core products). Separately, another feature called “AUTO_FRAMING” was also mentioned in that commit. If it’s anything like what we saw withwhat was Google Duo, this means your chat client’s field of view will crop and adjust to your positioning relative to where you are in the camera.
There are some hurdles the development team will need to clear before the feature goes live in earnest — one of them includes how to latch the manipulator onto the stream that goes into the client — so we’re willing to make the bet that the wait on these features will last months.
Re-basing background blur and other video effects from a cloud service down to local hardware will preclude the need for some users to pay for those extra features, but, as indicated with the benchmark hardware, you’ll probably need a pricier ChromeOS device to take advantage of them.
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