Meet Brand You photobooth

Meet Brand You Photobooth — Meta for Business Korea, 2023

Meet Brand You was a personalized photobooth experience for the Meta for Business event in Seongsu, Seoul. Visitors walked through a light tunnel synced to a Spark AR filter (headwear, glasses, and other overlays applied live), then received a short-form video personalized with their name and profile picture.

I was tasked with designing an experience personalized to each visitor and built the technical solution architecture — a QR-linked identity system coordinating capture devices, the light tunnel, and the backend pipeline — as well as the full visitor flow and staff choreography needed to run it live.

Visitor Experience

Visitors moved through four stages, each one carrying their identity forward without requiring them to type anything:

1. Customize — the visitor scans a Register QR, and their browser generates a unique User QR tied to their name and profile picture.
2. Video — the videographer scans the visitor's User QR to trigger the light sequence, then captures their video through the tunnel with a Spark AR filter applied live.
3. Upload — a staff member scans the User QR again, uploads the captured video, and starts processing in TouchDesigner.
4. Download — the visitor scans a Download QR at a delivery station to retrieve their finished, personalized video.

The User QR is what made the experience feel personal end to end — a single scan at registration carried the visitor's identity through capture, processing, and delivery, with no manual data entry at any stage.

Technical Approach

Spark AR doesn't support dynamic text injection into filters at the API level, which ruled out generating fully personalized video in a single pass. I split the pipeline instead: Spark AR handled the live AR filter during capture, and TouchDesigner handled compositing the name and profile picture as a post-processing layer, keyed to the visitor via their User QR, before export.

The light tunnel was synced to capture but not autonomous — the videographer scanned the visitor's User QR to trigger the light sequence manually at the start of each shoot, timing it to how they moved the visitor through the space.

I also designed the device handoff to avoid depending on venue WiFi, which is often unreliable at live events. The videographer captured video on a dedicated Spark AR phone (separate from the lighting-control phone they also carried), then physically handed that device to a second staff member, who scanned the User QR again to confirm identity before uploading the footage and starting the TouchDesigner composite. Splitting capture and upload across two staff and two devices kept the pipeline moving without waiting on network transfer.

Staff Roles

Running this live required three roles working in sync, each choreographed against the visitor's position in the space:

• Brand Ambassador — greets visitors at the entrance, assists with registration, and manages the Register QR handoff

• Videographer — carries both the lighting-control phone and the Spark AR capture phone; scans the visitor's User QR to trigger lights, then films the visitor through the tunnel

• Assistant — receives the Spark AR phone from the videographer, scans the User QR to confirm identity, uploads the video, and runs the TouchDesigner composite

• Designed a QR-linked identity system carrying visitor data (name, profile picture) across registration, capture, upload, and delivery

• Built in TouchDesigner for real-time video processing and post-capture personalization

• Spark AR used for live filter capture; personalization layer added downstream to work around Spark AR's lack of dynamic text support

• Light tunnel sync manually triggered via User QR scan, timed by the videographer to each visitor's movement through the tunnel

• Physical device handoff (rather than WiFi transfer) used to decouple capture from processing and avoid dependency on venue network reliability

• Three-role staff choreography (Brand Ambassador, Videographer, Assistant) designed around the visitor's path through the space

Collaborators

Meta x R/GA

Tags

Real-time system design, User Experience design