Behind the Scenes: Capturing Czech Hockey Legends in Augmented Reality

Why we photographed hockey legends instead of modelling them

For the Ice Hockey World Championship 2024 in Prague we built an AR experience that lets fans stand next to Czech hockey legends on a large digital signage screen. The interesting part of the project was never the screen — it was the source material. A hand-modelled 3D player looks wrong at full scale next to a real person, so we captured the players themselves in a studio session and worked from that.

The players in the shoot

The capture session featured Jaroslav Špaček, Martin Straka, Radko Gudas, Petr Nedvěd, Ondřej Pavelec, Tomáš Plekanec and Jiří Šlégr — a line-up that spans defencemen, forwards and a goaltender, which mattered for the AR scene: each position brings a different stance, silhouette and set of gear, and fans recognise those poses instantly.

Inside the capture session

Each player was photographed in full kit under controlled lighting, from the angles the AR scene would later need. Because the fan and the virtual player end up composited into the same frame, small mismatches are what break the illusion: the direction of the key light, the height of the camera relative to the player, and how a stick or glove sits at the edge of the silhouette.

We shot multiple takes per pose. Players are not models, and the poses that read best on screen are usually not the posed ones — the celebration mid-turn or the relaxed stance between shifts hold up better next to a real person than a static portrait.

Turning the shoot into a real-time AR scene

From the capture material we produced AR-ready figures that the application composites over the live camera feed in real time, so the fan sees themselves and the player together on the screen as they move. Two constraints drove the build: it had to render fast enough to feel like a mirror rather than a delayed video, and it had to be legible at large-format signage size, where compression artefacts and edge halos that are invisible on a phone become obvious.

The interaction itself is deliberately thin. There is no app to install and no menu to learn — a fan steps into frame, sees the player appear beside them, poses, and the photo is captured.

What we would do differently

Two lessons carried into later projects. First, capture more poses than the storyboard calls for: once the scene is running in a real space, the pose that works best is often one nobody planned. Second, test at final size and in the actual lighting of the location as early as possible — a scene that is convincing on a studio monitor can fall apart under mall lighting on a screen three metres wide.

Where this approach fits

The same pipeline — capture real people, composite them live, keep the interaction to a single step — underpins our AR photo booth and AR digital signage work, from the Kafka statue experience at Quadrio in Prague to the Fortuna League fan activation. If you are planning a fan zone or a championship activation, the practical question is usually not whether AR is possible, but who you can realistically get in front of a camera and how much time you have with them.

A longer, production-focused account of that session is in our write-up of the player capture process.