Blank Screen: the feature nobody asked for, until they needed it
Some sites accept no answer but a camera. Blank Screen gives them a clean generated feed — color, image, loop, or text — and it matters more than it sounds.
Phone as Camera is the feature people come for. Blank Screen is the feature they end up using every day. It’s the quiet one: a generated feed — a color, an image, a short loop, or text — that answers any site demanding a camera. It matters more than it sounds.
The site that won’t take no
A growing number of sites don’t just prefer camera-on; they gate the room behind it. No camera detected, no join button, no lobby, no support ticket that resolves before the meeting. For people with broken webcams this is a locked door, and the polite explanations (“my camera died”, “I’ll be audio-only”) stopped being accepted somewhere around 2021.
A generated feed opens the door without a webcam. The site’s check passes on a technically valid stream; your actual face, home and bedroom wall stay yours.
What people actually put on it
We shipped color first because it was a weekend. Then real usage taught us the list:
- A calm solid color — the default, and still the most used. Dark green reads as “professional” on every platform.
- A tidy desk photo — presence without your home in it.
- A short video loop — for long calls where a frozen tile looks like a frozen call.
- A word of text — “give me a minute”, “camera is dead”, a name. Surprisingly useful when the alternative is explaining yourself in chat.
All of it renders locally, on a canvas, in the extension. Nothing is uploaded — there’s no server in the loop to upload to.
The honest-use line
Blank Screen exists so a missing camera can’t lock you out, and so your background stays private. It is not a disguise kit. The other side should never be deceived about who they’re talking to — no impersonation, no identity games, no exam proctoring evasion. We wrote the line down on the responsible use page and put a visible marker on the page while a feed is live, on purpose.
The part users don’t notice until it saves a call
Blank Screen is also the fallback lane for Phone mode. Phone drops mid-call — train tunnel, locked screen, router hiccup — and the site never sees a broken camera. It sees the Blank feed. The phone returns; the camera returns. Nobody in the meeting notices, which is the entire point.
Free, like the rest of the core. Set yours once and it stands by quietly for the day you need it.