HyperCinema powers the world’s first personalized cinematic experience with Photoroom
The challenge: In order to deliver on a truly unique user experience, HyperCinema needed to find a flexible, high-quality image background remover that could deliver exceptional results 100% of the time.
Our solution: By leveraging Photoroom’s best-in-class API to seamlessly remove and replace image backgrounds, HyperCinema was able to bring its magic to life through the highest-quality output.
Results: HyperCinema was able to deliver a consistently top-notch customer experience that is remarkably reliable, entertaining, and automated.
A new era of cinema: Hyper-personalized, interactive AI storytelling that makes you the main character
HyperCinema is a hyper-personalized, interactive cinematic experience based in Auckland, New Zealand. The revolutionary technology productizes emerging, generative AI artwork to provide high-quality digital artworks in a way that’s never been done before.
Here’s how it works: you enter the HyperCinema venue and are directed to the specialized studio area where you have around 15 photos taken of you. Those photos are then turned into an instant album used to mimic the last five years of your life through a variety of situations. Think climbing a mountain, winning a boxing match, working as a chef or as a teacher, relaxing on a beach, or even crossing the raging seas in elaborate man-made ships as a Viking warrior.
That album is used to train a highly-specialized AI image and language generating model that ultimately creates your likeness. Then, you play a short game; a personality quiz that allows HyperCinema to learn more about your likes, dislikes, hopes, and dreams. All of this helps to ensure a completely personal experience.
Finally, all of that is weaved together to produce a highly unique and personalized, single-use (the story will be unique and different every time), 15-minute cinematic experience that makes you the hero of your own story in a truly inspiring, convincing, and memorable way.
In order to successfully create all of the content for said show—where customers can enjoy a historical documentary about themselves in another life experiencing various forms of fame and notoriety—HyperCinema’s AI model must remain highly flexible. This requires high image variety. Without it, the AI really struggles to produce the right imagery.
The AI must also swap out not only the character’s clothing to fit the scene, but the entire image background too, so that it matches the clothing. This avoids situations where a character is standing on top of Mount Everest, for example, in a business suit instead of in a more scene-appropriate puffer jacket.
HyperCinema Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Gareth Hordyk, was stuck in traffic one day when it came to him: what if we could swap out both the character’s clothing and the image’s background before we start training the AI models? Once back at his computer, he immediately started researching how he could best accomplish both.
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Seamless background replacement fit for cutting-edge AI-driven cinema
While HyperCinema’s own technology was able to easily swap out character clothing to match the scenes in each customer’s film, replacing image backgrounds quickly proved much more challenging. Because it’s not just about replacing the background, but also dealing with things like cutting clearly around the head without botching the hair, understanding character posture, and considering lighting conditions.
Hordyk and the team immediately began the hunt for a background replacement tool that could deliver the level of output required when building something like HyperCinema that is as unique and on the cutting-edge of where AI is today.
They tried Photoroom first and were immediately impressed with the reliability, speed, and output quality of the solution. The team also tried other background remover solutions for comparison’s sake, but Photoroom proved time and time again to be the only one doing it really well. In fact, Hordyk says that others only “kind of” worked,” but just about 70 percent of the time. The other 30 percent of the time, the solution would fail, doing unsettling and unacceptable things like half chopping off a person’s face as part of the background replacement.
That’s when going with Photoroom became a no-brainer. Without fail, it seamlessly completed a super clear cut of the image background, replaced said background with one that is perfectly matched to what the person is wearing, and was even sympathetic to lighting conditions. All of this allowed HyperCinema to very quickly generate the exact outcomes needed to best train the AI when producing each hyper-personalized cinematic experience.
Integrating the API into HyperCinema’s production system was also super straightforward. Hordyk says it was literally a five-minute process.
“Using Photoroom has allowed us to deliver a truly unique, hyper-personalized experience for our customers. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to get the flexibility into our models that allow us to create these one-of-a-kind creative experiences.” - Gareth Hordyk, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, HyperCinema
Delivering a consistently top-notch customer experience with Photoroom
Today, Photoroom continues to be a key part of the HyperCinema system, giving the team time and head-space to focus on other critical parts of their hyper engine as well as the business itself, while never having to worry about that critical piece: image quality. And as HyperCinema and generative AI itself continues to evolve and grow every single day, the team feels confident that Photoroom will be able to grow right along with it.
After a successful, starter seven-week run at its physical location in Auckland, HyperCinema is discovering all the ways in which this revolutionary technology can be used to create some of the most powerful storytelling we’ve ever seen for both personal consumption, and B2B and B2C marketing.
Hordyk says he and the team would definitely recommend Photoroom to anyone considering doing similar work. The simplicity, reliability, and flawlessness of the solution is truly unmatched, he says. The Photoroom team has been amazing to work with too. “It’s been great to engage with a group of people that really care about our success and are always actively working to help us improve our system, to make it more efficient.”
“Photoroom is rock-solid. The best part is we don’t have to think about it that much, because it’s that reliable and bullet-proof for us to use.” - Gareth Hordyk, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, HyperCinema
Ready to integrate Photoroom? Learn more about our API here. If you plan to process more than 500,000 images per year, contact us to meet with our experts.
