VMware Horizon Community
vPat
Contributor
Contributor

VDI VM Background Blur in Teams Meetings

Blurring Hardware for Modern PCs

Announced in July 2018 along with the free version of Teams, users can blur the background of video calls. The feature is now generally available. However, the technology to perform face recognition to identify the person and understand where the background to be blurred begins and ends only runs on reasonably recent PC equipped with Advanced Vector Extension 2 (AVX2) graphics. AVX2 is what Teams uses to blur the background after it figures out where the user is.

AVX2 is supported by PCs that have a post-Haswell chipset. Blurring works on my Surface Book 2, but doesn’t on my HP Envy 17 of 2014 vintage. Be aware that the CPU has some processing to do to locate a face and blur the background, so it can impact other work on the PC if you run a loaded system.

Background blur is supported in the Teams desktop client for Windows and Mac, but not in the Linux or browser clients.

For more information about the hardware requirements for blurring, see the note in hardware requirements for Microsoft Teams. More detailed information for Windows PC is in hardware decoder and encoder driver recommendations.

The optional Blur my background video effect requires a processor with Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (AVX2) support. See Hardware decoder and encoder driver recommendations for a list of unsupported decoders and encoders.

My VM users do not have the option to blur their background in Microsoft Teams is there any way to get this to work? somewhere in the VM setting? View settings?

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5 Replies
Raudi
Expert
Expert

There are 2 possible reasons that this AVX2 CPU feature isn't in the VM available even when the CPU has this feature:

- EVC with a lower CPU config

- a old VM hardware version

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serinfbco
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Also,

There's VDI Version for Teams, it affects these features that are not available.

Teams for Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs

These calling and meeting features are not supported:

  • Enhanced emergency services
  • HID buttons and LED controls between the Teams app and devices
  • Background blur and effects
  • Broadcast/live events
  • Location-Based Routing (LBR)
  • Call park
  • Call queue
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Raudi
Expert
Expert

I use teams in a VDI Session with a Teradici PCoIP Zero Client and use VDGA. I have background blur available, but have no option to replace the background...

This issue is very frustrating because it seems that there is no person who can help.

And i can't accept that in a high performance VDI session where i can play 3D games or use complex graphic and video applications a feature like individual backgrounds will be disabled.

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MaxStr
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Any chance you guys are adding support for more video clients, such as Webex or Zoom?

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chrisdhalstead
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Zoom has a plugin available for Horizon:

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360041602711

Chris Halstead
Senior Staff Architect, EUC Technical Marketing
chalstead@vmware.com
Twitter: @chrisdhalstead
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