Planet Fitness | NYE AR Filter

2020 was an atypical year, so our partners at Barkley needed an atypical solution to ring in 2021 for their client Planet Fitness. Planet Fitness is a major sponsor of the NYE celebration at Times Square and is known for their beloved celebratory hats. With approximately one million people unable to attend the annual ball dropping ceremony, we were tasked with bringing the party and the hats to fans using Instagram and Facebook.

The biggest challenge with any project like this is balancing the quality of the modeled assets with the appropriate file size to be processed by mobile devices. Optimization is key, so we created all models in-house to maximize texture efficiency and imported them into SparkAR to consistently test performance.

We helped the client extend the value of the filter by allowing multiple options for sunglasses which included a 2021 pair of shades and backgrounds that included confetti and the iconic NYE ball. The activation was a hit, garnering almost 300,000 impressions over 5 days and resulting in roughly 30% of those using the app and sharing it.