The reason it wasn’t working was that you were finding the dot product between the camera vector and the vector (0,0,1), which is the world “up” vector. What you should have been finding was the dot product between the camera vector and the pixel normal. You won’t get a Fresnel effect with either of the arguments of the dot product as a constant.
That said, the Fresnel effect is the way to go, I just felt you should know why your attempt didn’t work.