What Is Zoom Smart Gallery?

The hybrid workforce is expanding at a rapid rate. According to CNBC just under half of companies will use a hybrid work model in the second half of 2021. With the quickly evolving environment, maintaining meeting productivity is a key focus for many organizations. Fortunately, it is also a key focus for Zoom.

The recent release of one of Zoom’s newest features, the Zoom Rooms Smart Gallery, aims to make remote meeting participants feel more included and thus, more comfortable engaging in the meeting.

Zoom Smart Gallery takes one camera view of multiple participants and creates individual streams that mimic the typical Zoom Gallery view we’ve all become accustom to. This gives individuals in the meeting room their own square (a Virtual Camera) while maintaining the view of the entire group of meeting participants. Smart Gallery will create up to 2 virtual cameras that will be given to the two individuals that last spoke in the meeting. At the moment this feature requires a Zoom Rooms subscription and the Zoom Rooms Appliances version needs to be 5.7.0 or higher.

Smart Gallery is currently only available on the Poly Studio X bars, but is set to expand to other Poly cameras later this year.

Good news, Smart Gallery is currently available on the Poly Studio X bars with your Zoom Rooms subscription. If you already have either the Poly Studio X50 or X30, then make sure you have them updated to Poly VideoOS version 3.5.1 or higher. Prerequisites and setup instructions from Zoom can be found here.

If you don’t have a Studio X bar, the introduction of Smart Gallery is only one of many reasons to try them in your conference rooms. The all-in-one video bars are high quality and incredibly versatile. With no pc required, they have become a must have for many organizations. The recent introduction of Zoom Smart Gallery and Poly Presenter Mode prove that continued innovation will bring even more upgrades in the future as the AI gets stronger.