You can now add a bit of silliness to your Teams meetings with a chicken on your head or get Monday morning hugs from a sloth through Snapchat Lenses for Microsoft Teams. Last week, Microsoft announced that a collection of more than 20 of the most popular Snapchat Lenses will now be available to Teams customers globally.
As Teams has become an integral part of the modern workplace with 280 million users worldwide, new additions such as the Snapchat Lenses aim at making it enhancing the experience. The collection includes Sunglasses Lens, Bear in Love, Cat on Head, and the Sunset Lenses, which give users fun ways to express themselves, build relationships and add a bit of laugh in their meetings. Snapchat Lenses for Teams has been directly integrated and there is no need for any additional downloads, according to a Microsoft blog post.
Snapchat Lenses, made possible by Snap's Camera Kit, will enable users to add augmented reality (AR) effects to video calls, making interactions livelier, according to the blog post.
However, these effects are optional and users can choose to not use them or try out the more subdued ones such as the “smooth look” filter for a “glow up” to show up polished and camera-ready, which does not include any animations.
To use Snapchat Lenses, click on Video Effects, then More Video Effects, then scroll down in the right pane and select “Snapchat” under the “Filters” category and select your favourite Lens before joining. You can also add the filters after joining a meeting.
Recently, Microsoft Teams was overhauled to make the experience faster and simpler. Microsoft transitioned from Electron to Microsoft’s Edge WebView2 technology as the host as well as from Angular to React for building user interfaces. In a blog post, Microsoft explained that the key benefits of WebView2 include reduced memory usage and a lowered disk footprint as resources are shared with Edge.
