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:
    1. 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.
    2. Hearts – Use both hands to form a heart to have a number of hearts bubble up out of your hands and fill the screen.
    3. Laser Light Show – Make a laser light show appear behind you.
    4. Balloons – Celebrate someone by releasing animated balloons flying behind you by making a peace sign.
    5. 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
    1. 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).
    2. 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.
      1. Thumbs Up/Down
      2. Hearts
      3. Balloons
      4. Laser Light Show
      5. Fireworks
      6. Rain Cloud
      7. Confetti

For questions, concerns, comments or tip suggestions, please see http://itechgear.org or email tips@itechgear.org.

 

If you want to check out the iTechGear Weekly- and we sure hope you do – You can find the show on:

Leave a Reply

Discover more from iTechGear.org

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading