How To Get That Iconic Potato Filter & So Many Others On Zoom

You may have read by now about the boss who accidentally turned herself into a potato for the duration of her Microsoft Teams video conference. An absolute icon. If you haven't yet, a simple search for #PotatoBoss yields hundreds of results on Twitter.

And folks, you, too, can turn into a potato — or a baby, or even the Tiger King himself — directly on the video conferencing service of your choice, including Zoom, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams, and Skype. The filters in question come from Snap Camera, Snapchat's desktop app, which you can download here, as long as you have either Windows 7 SP1 (64 bit) or newer or MacOS 10.11 or newer. Once you have download the app, you can play around with its thousands of available Snapchat Lenses, from Star Freckles to Toilet Paper Craze — many of which were created by real users in Snapchat's Lens Creator community.

In order to use the Lenses on Zoom, select the up arrow next to the Stop Video button in the bottom left corner of your Zoom video conference. From there, select Snap Camera underneath the Select A Camera menu. This will pull video input from Snap, and should reflect whatever Snap Lens you're using in the Snap Camera app. The same applies to Hangouts and Skype — just select Snap Camera as the video input option in settings.

In the Snap Camera app, you can also star your favourite Lenses so that you can access them more easily, as well as search for Lenses by creator or Lens name. And while video conferencing, you can change your Lens in real time through Snap Camera — which means your boss and everyone else can see you trying on that pizza crown.

Over the past month, Snap has seen a tenfold increase in downloads of Snap Camera, and that makes sense — with a whole lot of working and learning from home going on, it's the little things that help us get by. Like turning our heads into potatoes for the company all-hands meeting.