ESSENCE Festival WebAR Filters
A public WebAR selfie activation supporting in-person and remote ESSENCE Festival participation through branded, identity-centered AR filters.
Create an event interaction that worked for people at the festival and people participating remotely.
For the ESSENCE Festival of Culture, the goal was lightweight participation rather than a headset-based activation or downloadable app. A browser-based face filter let users enter through a familiar selfie interaction while carrying festival iconography into images they could make and share from wherever they were.
Solo WebAR design and development within a collaborative brand process.
I designed and developed the 8th Wall experience myself, collaborating with a UK advertising agency contracted by ESSENCE on the visual direction and brand assets.
My role
Designer · Developer. I implemented the WebAR face tracking, 3D assets, animation, physics, cross-device testing, and final festival deployment.
Three visual treatments connected identity expression, Black beauty iconography, and festival participation.
The filters incorporated a flower crown / Black beauty visual treatment, three-dimensional ESSENCE branding, and animated elements that responded to head movement. Because the experience ran in the browser, users did not need to install a dedicated app before participating. A model demonstrates the deployed filters.
The filters were released publicly for the festival.
The experience was publicly deployed for ESSENCE Festival participation in 2021, supporting both people at the event and remote participants. The project demonstrates a different dimension of my technical practice: shipping a branded, cross-platform WebAR experience under real production constraints rather than treating AR only as a research prototype.