Facebook has tapped its Facebook Open Arts creative community to create artist-designed custom 360 backgrounds for Messenger Rooms and video calls. This way you will be able to customize your video calls based on which of the artistic backgrounds you will choose. They are teaming up with six artists from diverse and underrepresented communities who will be creating art that will incorporate their cultural influences and their own personal stories. They are doing this not just to give users more options but to “celebrate diversity, creativity and vibrancy in the arts.”
If you’re not yet familiar with Messenger Rooms, it’s a feature within Facebook and Messenger where you can create a room to host a group video call for up to 50 people, with no time limit, and best of all, it’s free. You are able to create and join a room from within the main Facebook app (News feed, Groups, or Events) or the Messenger app itself. You can control who can enter your room and who you can kick out, among other privacy and security controls.
Messenger has now teamed up with Facebook Open Arts and chosen six artists to collaborate with in creating 360 backgrounds. For now, they have introduced only one of the featured artists. Ana Serrano is a first-generation Mexican American and her background is called “Down the Street”. It shows off urban life in Latino neighborhoods and is inspired by her hometown, Los Angeles and the various formal and informal architectural styles found there.
To add her background, start a video call or create a Room then tap the effects icon. You can then tap on backgrounds and for now, this is the only one you’ll probably see. You can also access the backgrounds in the video call of Messenger or through the camera. They will probably announce the 5 other artists and their own backgrounds soon so users can have more options when personalizing their backgrounds during video calls.
There doesn’t seem to be anything you need to update to be able to access the customized backgrounds. Messenger Rooms will probably also add more features in the future to be able to compete with other video messaging / calling apps in the market.