Microsoft Teams: This New Look For Your Meetings Has Just Arrived

Microsoft has released its Teams Dynamic View feature as a public preview after teasing the feature back in January.

Dynamic view is intended to make video meetings in Teams better by automatically resizing shared content, such as slides, and video participants' faces. 

"Dynamic View ensures that important items like audio/video thumbnails, content, pins/spotlights are shown as large as possible on your screen by smartly moving and resizing them based on the scenario," Microsoft said in a blogpost. 

Microsoft's 'before and after' images demonstrate that video participants faces are now located in a grid on the right hand side of the screen, next to a slide, rather than below the slide. The slide itself is slight larger too. 

Meeting participants can also pick particular people to focus on during the meeting by pinning them. This displays that participant in a larger space. 

Also, Microsoft has adjusted Together Mode to enlarge the size of the video so that participants can see each others' faces more easily. Microsoft introduced Together Mode in teams last year using artificial intelligence to superimpose all participants into a shared space, such as an auditorium.     

Microsoft officials believe Together Mode will help alleviate virtual-meeting fatigue and make meetings feel more real. 

Finally, users can 'dock' meeting participants at a spot on the top of the screen, above shared content. This should help improve the impression of eye contact with multiple people on a video meeting. 

Eye contact is a challenge that Apple was working on before the pandemic solve on the iPhone via FaceTime Eye Contact. Apple used augmented reality to address the issue of people's gaze being directed at the screen rather than the front-facing camera, resulting in a subtle eye contact misdirection. Obviously that was when most video calls were just one-to-one meetings. Microsoft worked on the same challenge for video meetings on the Surface Pro X. 

Now that Dynamic View in Teams is available in public preview, meeting participants should see the Dynamic View experience by default if they have the public preview option enabled. The feature is available for the Teams desktop app on Windows 10 and macOS, but not iOS, Android or the web version of Teams in browsers. 

Dynamic View arrives alongside several well-being features Microsoft has rolled out to Teams, including its new virtual commute.