LEGO – Finding Kevin | Solarflare Studio

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Interactive Installation

Experiential Design

Motion Design

Global WebAR campaign Solarflare built for LEGO's Home Alone set launch with Wasserman and Ogilvy, letting users hunt AR Kevin through their environment with no app required.

A global AR hunt that needed no app

For the November 2021 launch of the LEGO Home Alone set, we partnered with Wasserman and Ogilvy to build a WebAR experience that put Kevin McCallister into people's living rooms, gardens, and offices around the world. No app download, no QR code redirecting to an app store. Users scanned a trigger and Kevin appeared, animated, in their environment immediately.The campaign was built around the set's nostalgia angle and the timing of the holiday season. We needed the barrier to entry as close to zero as possible, because the audience ranged from eight-year-olds unwrapping the box to adult collectors sharing the moment on social. WebAR delivered that. The experience ran in the browser on any modern phone, which meant the campaign could scale globally without fragmentation across iOS and Android app ecosystems.

How the hunt mechanic drove engagement

Kevin was not static. The experience was built around the Home Alone premise directly: users had to hunt for him. AR Kevin moved through the environment, reacted to being found, and rewarded the search with shareable moments designed to travel on social. The hunt mechanic gave people a reason to explore their immediate surroundings, which extended dwell time well beyond a standard AR filter.For LEGO and the agencies, the WebAR format solved a distribution problem that native AR still struggles with: you can put a link in a tweet, on the back of packaging, in a display ad, or in a TikTok caption and the experience loads for everyone. That single-link reach was central to how the campaign got to global scale from a targeted launch.

Technical build and global rollout

We built the experience on a WebAR framework capable of surface detection and persistent placement across the range of devices the campaign would hit, including older mid-range Android handsets where AR performance degrades quickly. Kevin's animations were optimised for mobile GPU constraints without compromising the character quality that LEGO's brand required. The trigger assets were designed to work reliably in varied lighting, including the low-light conditions of a Christmas morning living room.The campaign launched globally in November 2021 alongside the set release and ran through the holiday period. For Wasserman and Ogilvy, it demonstrated that WebAR at scale is a viable alternative to app-based experiences for brand activations where broad reach and immediate access matter more than platform-native depth.

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