Unity - Blur Behind Window

I'm looking for a way to Blur my background behind a GUI window in Unity. Think Windows 7 GUI. When a window pops up you can still see what is behind that window but it is blurred. Is this possible? If so how would one go about producing this effect?

Thanks.

Steps I took to make this happen. The great part is that it doesn’t render anything extra, rather it applies the effect to whatever is being rendered behind it. (Excluding GUI components.)

  • Made a new camera, depth only, culling mask as nothing.
  • Added blur effect to the new camera
  • Positioned the new blur overlay via viewport rect

Here’s a quick example I made by putting the camera in that area, and putting a translucent black overlay via the GUI.

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Two options:

  1. A full-screen shader - there's one for blur already on the Pro standard assets.
  2. Rendering your screen to a texture and blurring it through some other process.

Both are Pro-Only features.