AI Photobooth
A full-stack AI photobooth for pop-ups, museums, and brand events. Tap an iPad, walk away with an AI portrait that keeps your likeness in a whole new world. No app download, no training on user data, the entire stack built in-house.
The Experience
Walk Up
An iPad on a stand runs the web app. No sign-up, no download. The screen invites users to tap and begin.
Capture
User taps to take a photo. A 3-second countdown appears on screen followed by a flash. Photo is captured instantly.
Preview
User sees a preview of their captured photo and confirms to proceed to AI generation.
Generate
The AI transforms their photo in ~15 seconds. Contextual loading text keeps users engaged - explaining what's happening in real-time so the wait feels like part of the experience.
Take Home
The final AI-generated image lands on a branded page with a QR code. Users scan to download, share, or revisit - all while still at the booth. The QR page doubles as a marketing touchpoint.
How It Works
Identity Preservation
The AI is fine-tuned to retain the user's identity and likeness - facial features, skin tone, expression - while placing them in completely different environments, art styles, and scenarios. No user data is stored or used for model training. The likeness lock works in a single pass with no pre-training required.
Infinite Scenarios
Place users courtside at the Super Bowl, inside a cartoon world, on stage at a concert, or next to a celebrity. Each preset is a prompt configuration that defines the scene, style, and compositing rules. New scenarios can be spun up for any brand, event, or theme - the system is endlessly extensible.
Owned Ecosystem
Every touchpoint is built and controlled in-house: the capture app, the AI pipeline, the generation display, the QR-code landing page, and the distribution flow. Full control over branding, user experience, data privacy, and monetization - no third-party photobooth vendor in the loop.
Built for Activations
Designed for high-traffic experiential environments - pop-up events, museum installations, brand activations, festivals, and retail spaces. The iPad-on-stand setup is portable and requires only a WiFi connection. The web app handles the rest.
Generated Outputs
Proven in the Field
4th Annual Friends & FANmily Game
A back-to-school community day at Victory Field in Queens, August 2026, outdoors and all ages, put on by Mets creators and local sponsors including the Fanatics Fan Advisory Network and AmazinVntg. I ran the trading-card booth: guests took a selfie and walked away with a custom card of themselves in a batting pose, sponsor logos on the back. 170+ cards in one day with zero timeouts, and no guest hit a dead end. The booth ran with no laptop on site; copy tweaks and a faster countdown went live from a phone mid-game.
amNY covered the day; the “virtual trading card activation” in their write-up is this booth. Read the amNY story.
Designed for the Bad Day
Image APIs fail a few percent of the time no matter who runs them. Every failure path here gets an instant retry and friendly on-screen copy, because a guest who reads an error message walks away. Stress tests before launch set the timeout budget. Watching the first real guests set the countdown speed and rewrote the capture prompt from asking for a batting pose to asking for a selfie, since the system poses the guest itself.
Cards above come from the real event pipeline; the people in them are generated, so no guest's face appears here without asking.
Use Cases
Brand Pop-Ups
Deploy at product launches, store openings, or sponsored events. Custom-branded presets put users into your brand's world and give them a shareable takeaway.
Museums & Exhibitions
Interactive installation where visitors become part of the exhibit. Place guests inside famous paintings, historical moments, or imagined futures.
Festivals & Live Events
High-throughput booth for concerts, food festivals, and cultural events. The QR landing page doubles as a marketing touchpoint long after the event ends.
