How To – Use Reaction Hand Gestures on a Mac
To use hand gestures in Microsoft Teams on a Mac, follow these steps:
- Ensure your Mac is running macOS Sonoma or later and has an Apple Silicon processor Any M-Series processor (M1-M4) will work.
- In the Teams app, enable hand gestures by going to Settings > General > Meetings, and selecting the Allow reactions checkbox.
- During a meeting, tap the React button in the meeting controls to see a list of available reactions.
- To show a reaction, make the appropriate hand gesture while on camera and away from your face, holding the gesture until you see the desired effect:
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- Thumbs Up or Down – Make a thumbs up or thumbs down gesture with either hand to see a thumbs up/down emoji in a content bubble.
- Hearts – Use both hands to form a heart to have a number of hearts bubble up out of your hands and fill the screen.
- Laser Light Show – Make a laser light show appear behind you.
- Balloons – Celebrate someone by releasing animated balloons flying behind you by making a peace sign.
- Fireworks – Show your deep approval and agreement of decisions, action items and other awesomeness by giving two thumbs up and a show of exploding fireworks behind you.
These same gestures will work with other communication apps like Zoom and FaceTime on your Mac. For FaceTime, do the following:
- Open FaceTime. A Green camera icon should appear in your Menu Bar.
- Click it and choose Reactions near the bottom of the fly-out menu. The icon should go from black on gray, to white on green, showing that it has been activated.
- You can activate the same emojis as noted above (plus a few others) in FaceTime via either of the following methods
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- Use the Hand Gestures noted above for Microsoft Teams – the same hand gestures will work for FaceTime (or any other compatible comms app that they are enabled for).
- Use the Reactions Menu – with FaceTime as the active program window, tap the white on green camera icon in the menu bar. Choose the > icon at the very right of Reactions. The fly-out menu will expand. You have the following choices. Activate each reaction by clicking on it. The fly-out will stay active so you can turn the effect off.
- Thumbs Up/Down
- Hearts
- Balloons
- Laser Light Show
- Fireworks
- Rain Cloud
- Confetti
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