How AR Photo Booths Work at Sports Events

What an AR photo booth is at a sports event

An AR photo booth puts a virtual figure into the same frame as a real visitor and captures the result. At a sports event that figure is usually a player, and the appeal is straightforward: fans want a picture with someone they recognise, and the player cannot be in twelve places at once.

We have built this in two different arrangements — one where the screen does everything, and one where the screen starts the interaction and the fan's phone finishes it. Both are described below with what they actually required. The format overview is on the AR photo booth page.

The visitor journey, screen-first

At the Ice Hockey World Championship 2024 the journey has no prerequisites at all. Spectators walking through Prague encounter large digital screens showing larger-than-life hockey players. A fan steps into the camera's view, the application composites the player over the live camera image in real time, the fan poses, and a photo or a short video of a goal celebration is captured. Nothing to install, nothing to wear.

The reason to keep it that thin is the setting. These screens stand in public space where the visitor has not planned to take part, so every step you add between walking past and having the photo is a step where people leave. During the World Championship the signage became a focal point, with fans queuing to be photographed next to a legend — which itself only works if the round is short enough that a queue moves.

The visitor journey, app-supported

The Fortuna League activation runs a different flow, and it is worth resisting the temptation to generalise it to every AR photo experience.

The fan opens the Fortuna League app, approaches a digital signage unit placed around the stadium or another key location, and scans the QR code on that unit to activate the AR feature. The app then places a virtual representation of a player into the real-world background behind the fan, the photo is taken on the fan's own device, and it can be shared to social media from the app.

That design makes sense for a league audience that already has a reason to hold the app. The fan owns the image the moment it exists, sharing is one step, and the venue side stays light — nothing is installed beyond the signage itself.

The part nobody sees: preparing the figures

The visible half of an AR photo activation is a screen. The half that determines whether it works is the content.

For the Championship, each hockey legend was captured in a controlled studio session and processed into an AR-ready figure. That was not a stylistic preference. A figure shown life-size beside a real person is compared directly with that person, and material that looks fine on a small screen falls apart at full scale — so the capture had to be good enough for the largest format it would ever appear in.

The capture session covered Jaroslav Špaček, Martin Straka, Radko Gudas, Petr Nedvěd, Ondřej Pavelec, Tomáš Plekanec and Jiří Šlégr — defencemen, forwards and a goaltender, because each position has a stance, silhouette and set of gear that fans recognise instantly. Lighting direction, camera height relative to the player and how a stick or glove sits at the edge of the silhouette are the details that decide whether the composite reads as one photograph or two pasted together. The longer production account goes through that session in detail.

Why sports events suit this format

Three reasons, none of which require statistics to argue.

Recognition. The value of the photo comes from who is standing next to the fan. A sport with well-known players gives you subjects the audience identifies without a caption.

Identity. People at a match or a championship are already publicly displaying an affiliation. A photo that expresses it is a natural extension of what they came to do.

Context and place. The event is a moment with a date attached, and the fan zone or the surrounding city already concentrates people who are standing around between fixtures — the exact conditions a walk-up experience needs.

Delivery models we have actually run

On-screen capture with no prerequisites, as at the Championship: the photo or short video is produced by the signage application from the live camera feed.

QR hand-off to a companion app, as at Fortuna League: the signage carries the QR code, the app performs the AR composite and the capture, and sharing happens from the app.

In-app sharing as the output route: in both the Fortuna case and our Kafka photo experience at Quadrio Mall the image leaves with the visitor through the app rather than as a printout or an on-screen gallery.

Which one to choose is mostly a question of whether your audience will already have your app in their pocket.

Operational considerations

These are the practical points we plan around; they are design constraints from our deployments rather than measured benchmarks.

Round length governs the queue. When a single visitor's turn is short, the people waiting stay; when it is long, they become spectators and then passers-by.

The interaction zone governs the placement. The camera defines where a person has to stand to be part of the scene, so the screen position must coincide with a place where someone can comfortably stop.

Unassisted operation is the default. Our experiences are built so that a visitor can start, pose, capture and leave without a member of staff explaining anything, which is what allows the same activation to stand at several locations at once.

Test at final size and in the real lighting. A scene that convinces on a studio monitor can fall apart on a three-metre screen in the venue's actual light.

More context on the sector is on our sports and entertainment page, and the neighbouring signage formats are compared in our AR deployment formats article.