Microsoft Teams: flip camera horizontally
Microsoft Teams supports video calls and it works seamlessly with whichever webcam is connected to your system. You can use an external camera, an internal camera, or a virtual camera to customize your video feed. Microsoft Teams doesn’t have a lot of features for the camera; there is background blur and mirroring.
Microsoft Teams: flip camera
Microsoft Teams flips the camera feed for a user horizontally. This became noticeable when you hold up something in writing e.g. a note or a book. The text is impossible to read this way and many users worry how it looks to other people in a meeting.
The good news is, other people in a meeting see the text correctly; it isn’t mirrored or flipped for them. If you’re writing on a board or holding up a sign or book, the image appears as it should.
The mirrored or flipped text isn’t a problem for other people in a meeting however, the presenter is often thrown by it since they can’t read the text from their monitor and instead have to keep looking at it (or use a physical mirror set-up). Here’s a simple way to fix it so that everyone sees text correctly.
Microsoft Teams: flip camera horizontally
In order to get a camera feed that isn’t flipped for you, but that everyone else can also read you need to use a camera app and the presentation mode in Microsoft Teams.
- Download YouCam and install it (use the free version).
- Open YouCam and click the gear icon at the top right.
- Uncheck the ‘Flip horizontally’ option.
- Check to make sure the text is appearing correctly.
- Open Microsoft teams.
- Start or join a meeting.
- Click the presentation mode button at the top right.
- Select YouCam to present from.
- You will see text appear correctly in YouCam.
- Everyone in the meeting will see text appear correctly as shared from YouCam.
Note: You can use any other app instead of YouCam as long as it gives you the option to turn flipping/mirroring off.
Conclusion
The mirroring that Microsoft Teams does is so that a user’s camera feed appears more natural to them. The text flipping is an unfortunate side-effect which users have been asking Microsoft to fix. There is, as yet, no indication that it will be fixed. If you have to use Microsoft Teams to teach, this method may be the simplest, cost-effective solution to the mirroring problem.
