Not everyone has the benefit of having a well-lighted house or room to make things easy for your video conference. Sometimes, because of different time zones, you have to go on at night and so lighting conditions aren’t as perfect. Google Meet, formerly known as Hangouts Meet, is the video conference tool of Google that is trying to get in on the Zoom/Microsoft Teams/Skype market. Now they’re bringing a low-light mode to solve your lighting problems while on a video call.
If Google Meet detects that you’re in a low lighting condition, it will automatically enhance your video to adapt to it. The change will gradually start five seconds after you enter an area that it determines has low lighting. It will “intelligently adapt” to your environment so if the condition improves, it will turn off the processing but if goes bad again, it will increase the enhancements again.
You do not have to tap anything to adjust the lighting as everything is done automatically so no need for admin controls. This feature is actually turned on by default but if you want it not to work automatically for some reason, you can turn it of in the in-call settings menu. Since the camera hardware and processing capabilities are different for each device, the lighting adjustment may vary and may not have the same effect always.
Google Meet has been seeing a lot of improvements lately as they compete with the more popular apps like Zoom. They recently improved on the number of simultaneous participants on screen from 4 to 16, with a 4×4 grid layout now available. You can also now present a Chrome tab directly instead of having to show your entire window. It can now also filter out background noises which is important now that a lot of us are working from home.
The low-light mode for Google Meet is now rolling out to G Suite users on their Android devices while the other features, except for the background noise filter, are also now available. The noise filter will be available in the next few weeks, for web first then mobile.
