The first custom AI Photo Booth Snapmatic built spent four days on a tech conference floor in Barcelona in May 2023. Everything before that had been a test we ran on ourselves. This was the first time delegates decided whether it worked.
Client: Nteractive
Event: Four-day tech conference
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Date: May 2023
The challenge: a first live deployment
The brand experience agency Nteractive commissioned Snapmatic to build an AI photo experience around a single idea: discovering your inner hero. A delegate would step up, have their photo taken, and get back a hero version of themselves. The bar for an interactive stand at a conference like this is easy to state and hard to hit. It has to be new, it has to hold up all day, and people have to want to share what comes out of it.
Preparation gets you to the door. A live floor is a different problem: real lighting, real faces, four days with no reset. This was the first-generation booth, so the conference doubled as its stress test.
The solution: "discover your inner hero"
Snapmatic built a custom AI theme for the brief rather than applying an off-the-shelf style to it. Delegates had their photo taken on the stand and got a hero portrait back on their own phone. Where the image ended up mattered as much as how it looked. A print sits in a bag until someone unpacks it; an image on a phone goes straight to LinkedIn.
What happened on the floor
Delegates changed their LinkedIn profile pictures during the show, posted to Instagram from the stand, and the activation made a visible mark on the exhibition floor. We did not capture participation figures at this event, so there are none quoted here. The clearest measure of how it went is what happened next.
Why it worked
Two things carried it, and neither one is the AI. The theme was specific: "your inner hero" gives someone a reason to stop at a stand and a reason to show a colleague the result, where "AI portrait" on its own gives neither. The output was also built for the place it was going to end up. A delegate's most valuable piece of real estate that week is their LinkedIn profile picture, and the booth produced something they were willing to put there.
Nteractive booked the booth again for their US conference four weeks later, with hardware supplied through our US delivery partner instead of shipped from Europe. They came back the following year too, when we ran the Gen 2 booth at HPE's invite-only conferences in Atlanta and Vienna.
Conclusion
Barcelona set the pattern the rest of the work follows: build the theme around the client's idea instead of applying a filter over it. The underwater theme we built for Snorkel AI at the Generative AI Summit and DogeOS's booth at Korean Blockchain Week were made the same way. Three years on, the AI photo booth is a long way past this first build, but the thing that made it work in Barcelona has not changed.
