The age of video conferencing that begun last year has forced many of us to re-evaluate not only their computers but also their rooms and residential office setups. Additionally, having an honest webcam, disorganized backgrounds, and poor lighting add more concerns to mentally stressed people. The previous has been fixed by virtual backgrounds, which sometimes find you to be more distracting. At the same time, the latter is being addressed by automatic lighting adjustment, one that’s finally coming to Google Meet on Web browsers.
Unlike at the office, we’ve less control over our working environment reception. From distractions to room setup to weather, there are times once we don’t have that much control over what our present conditions are when a video meeting starts. Video conferencing platforms have began to use AI, computer vision, and algorithms to compensate, and Google Meet is not any different.
It was actually back in April 2020 when Google introduced automatic light adjustment to satisfy on Android and iOS. The concept is simple because it uses the phone’s sensors to work out lighting conditions and uses AI to regulate the video feed to decorate your day. It’s an easy feature that has significant benefits to the user and everyone participating in the meeting.
Curiously, it took quite a year for Google Meet to realize an equivalent feature on its Web version. Probably Google had to resort to even smarter algorithms to work out a low-light situation since many computers or webcams don’t have ambient light sensors.
This feature is out there only to Google Workspace, G Suite Basic, and G Suite Business customers, and has started rolling out today. Once updated, it’s enabled by default, and admins haven’t any control over it. End users, however, can manually turn it off, and that they might want to try to do so at certain times, for instance, when there’s proper lighting available, because it could affect the computer’s performance when in use.
