Fame Cam

Closer to Celebrity

Madame Tussauds is world famous for its lifelike models of celebrities, but in a world of visual effects and digital experience, waxworks are beginning to lose their lustre. Fame Cam was designed to add a layer of immersive, digital engagement to the traditional Madame Tussauds experience, offering visitors the chance to get closer to their idols. By pointing their device at a model, they could spark AR content that brought their heroes to life or showed some of their stats. The effect was to deepen their sense of interaction and add dynamism to an inherently static experience.

Using the app, visitors can see celebrities’ facial expressions move, change their outfits and learn more about them, all in AR.

By exploring all of the celebrities, visitors are rewarded with discounts in the gift shop.

The development process was far from easy, with the volume of models and the requirement to recognise them from different angles creating a vast amount of data for the app to sift through. In testing, this was found to slow down the experience to the point of user frustration, which necessitated a complete shift to add machine learning in order to speed up the process. We introduced our model to Madame Tussauds models, and it learned to recognise them in a fraction of the time it had previously taken. The result was a near instant experience across the entire A-List zone in the attraction, and lots of delighted visitors.