White City House Halloween Party

// services

Interactive Installation

Experiential Design

Real-Time Visuals

Fog-screen AI skull entrance Solarflare built for White City House's Halloween party with Soho House and Bacardí, featuring a real-time AI-animated character that responds to approaching guests.

A fog screen that greets you with a skull

For White City House's annual Halloween party, we built an AI-animated fog-screen entrance with Soho House and Bacardí. The mechanics were practical: a rig projecting onto a column of dense fog at the venue entrance, with a skull character animated in real time by an AI system responding to guests approaching. Walk toward the entrance and the skull sees you. It tracks you, reacts, and performs differently for every person who passes through.Fog-screen projection is an established physical effects format but it is usually pre-rendered: a looping video on an atmospheric medium. Adding a real-time AI animation layer that responds to live sensor input changes the dynamic entirely. The installation has agency. Guests tested it, tried to make it react differently, lingered at the entrance, photographed it, and went back through again.

How the AI animation layer worked

The AI system used proximity and movement data from a sensor array at the entrance to drive the skull's animation state in real time. Approach speed, distance, and lateral position each mapped to different animation responses, so the skull's behaviour varied naturally from guest to guest without requiring any predefined scripting for specific interactions. The result was a character that felt genuinely responsive rather than randomly variable.We built the system to perform reliably in a busy nighttime event environment. High ambient noise, dense crowds, variable lighting, and guests interacting with the installation simultaneously all create conditions that break simpler sensor-driven systems. The AI layer was tuned against a realistic model of event density to ensure the skull's responses remained legible and impressive even when multiple people were passing through at once.

Why this format works for brand activations

Bacardí's involvement in the event meant the installation needed to generate shareable content organically, without prompting. A fog-screen skull that reacts to you is photographed and filmed without instruction. It is a natural content moment that travels on Instagram and TikTok in a format that shows the brand in a genuinely creative context rather than a sponsored-post one.For Soho House, the installation elevated the entrance moment from atmospheric decoration to an interactive character with personality. Guests talked about it during the event and shared it afterward, which extended the reach of the party's branding well beyond the room. The format, real-time AI animation on a physical projection medium, is replicable for other brand activation contexts where dwell time and organic content generation are the primary metrics.

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