Sometimes well-crafted promos can achieve a show’s objectives with as much potency as the show itself. Case in point: DerriereLeMur (“Behind the Wall”), an interactive campaign for the exclusive airing of Season 3 of Bates Motel on France’s NBC Universal-owned network, 13ème Rue. While the A&E drama has spent more than two-and-a-half seasons pondering what it’s like to be the complicated figure of Norman Bates, this simple yet hard-hitting microsite takes almost no time at all in directly engaging viewers with one of the most iconic aspects of his character: Peeping.

In December, A&E released a teaser for Season 3 that aped the famous “Peeping Tom” moment from its original inspiration, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. It was a tantalizing indicator that after dabbling in the business of back-story in Seasons 1 and 2, Bates Motel was finally going to start aligning Norman’s orbit with that of Anthony Perkins’ version in the 1960 film. But DerriereLeMur shows the concept can be taken even farther—by turning the user’s screen itself into a peephole and letting the viewer literally slip into the skin of a voyeur. Rather than spying on the lingerie-clad hotel guest, however, the digital hole looks in on a Season 3 trailer, thereby offering a fun and innovative way for fans to engage with an otherwise straight-forward promo.

Developed by the French social TV agency Darewin, DerriereLeMur is most striking for the way it pairs with webcams, zooming in and out of the peephole depending on users’ proximity to the lens. Darewin president and creative director Wale Gbadamosi Oyekanmi told Brief his development team built the facial recognition technology using the Viola-Jones object detection framework, an open-source algorithm that enables the webcam to “detect the face of the user and then set parameters calculating the distance between the face of the user and their screen.”

When the user moves away from the screen, the wall decreases in size; when the user approaches the screen, it becomes closer and the hole larger.

“If you were to try and use your hand,” said Oyekanmi, “the technology wouldn’t function.”

Though one can go through the entire DerriereLeMur peep show in minutes or less, the ability to change the size of the hole creates fascinating possibilities regarding perspective. Placing your face close to the camera and thereby producing a full-screen view of the trailer, for instance, puts the trailer in a different light than watching it from farther and farther back, in which case the borders of the peep hole encroach on the video more and more. Even more fascinating, the sound of the spot changes with the size of the hole.

“The volume level is proportional to the distance between the user and the screen,” said Oyekanmi. “The closer the user, the louder the audio.”

Traditional promos generally have urgent information to relate, but it’s getting increasingly difficult to make viewers stick around for their duration. Darewin’s campaign is essentially a traditional promo repackaged in an interactive device that’s hard to resist and easy to share.

“From the moment we had the creative idea in place, the concept became instinctive,” said Oyekanmi, “and the technology tied to the webcam served our objective. We’re hoping the whole world will put themselves in the skin of a voyeur with this symbolic act of approaching the wall/screen to transform an experience from fiction to reality.”

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