When the College Football Hall of Fame opened in downtown Atlanta 10 years ago, its goal was to provide attendees a personalized experience using their favorite college team from more than 750 options.
You could see the best players from that school, sing your school’s fight song karaoke style and provide an “ESPN GameDay” assessment.
Now the museum, celebrating its 10th anniversary in Atlanta after moving from South Bend, Indiana, is enhancing the personalization by taking advantage of recent advances in artificial intelligence.
At a kiosk at the entrance or on your phone, your face will be scanned at various angles and you’ll be asked a series of questions such as your favorite football team, favorite stadium food item, best word to describe yourself and what football position you’d like to play.
After a few minutes, the system, created by a New Zealand company HyperCinema, will generate photos and videos of you in various college football locations as you move along in the museum.
“What’s exciting is the AI allows us to put people in the stories,” said Geoff Thatcher, a brand consultant for Creative Principals who helped design the new personalization for the museum.
All prior personalization remains, said Kimberly Beaudin, the College Football Hall of Fame’s chief executive officer since 2020. The AI work, she said, is “all additive.”
I chose Princeton University, my alma mater. Early on, there are two AI-generated photos of me in the stands cheering my team on, one with suspect hair and the other with face paint.
There also is amusing AI-generated copy, none of which is true: “Every game day, Rodney dons Princeton’s vibrant black and orange, leaving from Atlanta, Georgia. His quirky ritual involves assembling jigsaw puzzles of famous victories while humming school anthems with upbeat cheer.”
Credit: RODNEY HO/[email protected]
The museum places you in various football-themed scenarios. You could be posing with your team’s mascot, parading downfield as part of the marching band, yelling heartily as a cheerleader or being a fan from the 1920s or 1980s.
“There’s a huge amount of variety within the photos, but it stays within particular guardrails,” said Miles Gregory, chief executive officer of HyperCinema. “These are very tightly locked down. It’s very different from putting your face in something. You’re transported into a different world, where it’s like a version of you.”
“It’ll take someone who is bald and give them hair,” Thatcher said. “Sometimes it will take someone with hair and make them bald.”
“This brings people together to enjoy themselves,” Gregory said, as attendees can make fun of each other’s images and videos. “Unlike virtual reality, which is quite individual and isolated, this enables people to have fun in a group.”
Indeed, my AI-created mullet from 1987 was not my actual hairstyle of choice in 1987 and elicited some mighty guffaws from onlookers. And a cheerleader outfit gave me ridiculously long legs.
Credit: RODNEY HO/[email protected]
There were some challenges with the AI photos featuring the mascots. “We did the Fighting Irish for Notre Dame and he looked like a serial killer stalking you, so we used a shamrock instead,” Thatcher said.
In the football coach’s display, I receive a 45-second fake bio of my life as a “coach we never knew,” including AI shots of me as a child, a player and a coach as well as owner of a hot dog store in my elder years since I chose hot dog as my favorite stadium food.
“It’s the same story arc, but there are four different narrators, four different tracks of music,” Thatcher said.
The hot dog subject comes up again as part of my dubious workout diet along with a fake photograph of a much buffer version of myself. Later, I’m shown holding overly large hot dogs. “That was done on purpose,” Thatcher said, for laughs.
The final personalized touch happens when you enter the final space, an open field to throw and kick footballs if you choose. A brief recruiting video plays on the big screen touting your bona fides as a potential football star at your school.
This leads you to a revamped gift shop, where the AI-generated videos and photos are available for $9.99.
Credit: NATRICE MILLER
Credit: NATRICE MILLER
In all, the new AI innovations provide a unique way to experience the museum even for the mildest of college football fans.
“I just love the playfulness of it,” Beaudin said. “For me, at the end of the coach’s video when they age you, it looked just like my mother. It was so wild! What I love the most is seeing generations interact. It touches something different for everyone, but it touches everyone.”
Credit: RODNEY HO/rho@a
Credit: RODNEY HO/rho@a
Here are other revisions the museum, which draws about 250,000 people a year, has made in recent months:
- Entering the museum, they added a curated music mix of songs that have resonated at football stadiums over the years, such as “Sweet Home Alabama,” “Sweet Caroline” and “Jump Around.”
- There is new space set aside to honor the military. “We had an opportunity to create a footprint to show the intersection of the military and football,” Beaudin said. The area includes a video that morphs into a flag mural and a desk owned by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who used football analogies in the heat of battle.
- A special room specifically honors the museum’s 10 years in Atlanta, which includes a timeline, the past 10 classes inducted into the Hall of Fame and a brick that was thrown into the museum during the George Floyd protests in 2020.
Credit: NATRICE MILLER
Credit: NATRICE MILLER
IF YOU GO
College Football Hall of Fame
10 p.m.- 5 p.m. daily, except closed Tuesdays. $35; $27 children. 250 Marietta St. NW, Atlanta. cfbhall.com.
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