The International Spy Museum, in collaboration with Cortina Productions and Pisci.Ai powered by Insight Face, launches a first-of-its-kind AI disguise interactive as part of its popular RFID-enabled experience, Undercover Mission. Developed specifically for the International Spy Museum, this interactive marks the first time AI will be used in this way for its museum visitors, in this case offering unique and advanced face-swapping application to create a one-of-a-kind photo op.
The experience was developed by the team at Cortina Productions, who understood the museum’s primary objectives for the update: offer an enhanced version of the Disguise Interactive to ensure a fun, intuitive, and efficient experience. With advances in AI, Cortina proposed an upgraded experience that allows visitors to generate custom spy persona images using AI. This new approach provides high-quality, personalized takeaways without altering the original registration stations, ensuring a seamless integration with existing setups.
“It’s exciting to create new experiences at the forefront of technology,” shares Kathryn Keane, vice president of exhibitions and collections at the museum. “While AI has begun to debut in certain aspects of museums and cultural institutions, we have created something totally new here at the International Spy Museum with the help of our partners at Cortina Productions. The specialized facial recognition technology brings visitors face-to-face with the art of disguise – showing them how it works in a personalized and memorable way.”
Early research and development led Cortina to leverage the Pisci.ai image software, which uses advanced face-swapping technology to overlay a visitor’s face onto an image. To ensure a quick dwell time, Cortina adopted Stable Diffusion, an open-source AI model, to generate high-quality “base images” to serve as the pre-rendered background for the face-swap. By running Stable Diffusion with varied prompts over several days, Cortina produced around 100,000 images across a range of styles, ages, and accessories – all vetted through both automatic filtering and human vetting to address AI-generated quality challenges and bias.
The resulting visitor experience is a fun photo opportunity that invites guests to make personalized selections for a custom spy disguise. Visitors can choose from various image styles, such as realism or Film Noir; different accessories to help blend into an environment, such as a scarf or a hat; and a range of ages, including kid, teen, and adult. Once the disguise is determined, a real-time image of the guest is then combined with one of the pre-rendered AI images to provide an instant personalized SPY takeaway.
“Significant advances in AI have enabled museums to create dynamic, personalized visitor experiences. The Spy Museum was among the first to utilize this new technology, and Cortina Productions was thrilled to partner with them to create the new disguise experience,” says Bryan Heisey, principal, operations at Cortina Productions. “Far from being deterred by the new technology, guests have embraced the opportunity. We’ve been blown away by the enthusiastic visitor response and post-visit engagement.”
For more information, please visit www.spymuseum.org.
