Loreal Viva Tech 2024

The Brief

Beauty for Each Powered by Beauty Tech. Viva Technology is Europe's biggest tech event, where business and innovation intersect for good. For the 2024 edition in Paris, L'Oreal Groupe wanted to showcase and contextualize its newest range of beauty tech solutions, services, and devices. In collaboration with Superbien, I served as lead technical developer on the interactive installation, building the real-time experience in Unity with computer vision integration. The installation featured advanced face tracking and augmented reality beauty demonstrations, allowing visitors to experience L'Oreal's latest innovations firsthand through real-time rendering on large-format displays.

My Role as Lead Technical Developer

As the lead technical developer on this project, I was responsible for the complete technical implementation of the interactive installation, working in close collaboration with the creative team at Superbien and the L'Oreal Groupe innovation division. I built the real-time Unity application that drives the installation, integrating a computer vision pipeline for face detection and facial landmark tracking that operates reliably in the challenging lighting conditions of a busy trade show floor. I developed the augmented reality beauty overlay system that applies virtual makeup products — foundation, lipstick, eyeshadow, and more — onto visitors' faces in real time with sub-frame latency, displayed on large-format screens visible to both the participant and surrounding crowds. I implemented the custom shaders responsible for realistic skin-tone blending, product color accuracy, and the subtle lighting adjustments that make virtual beauty products appear convincing under varying ambient conditions. I also designed the installation's interaction flow, managing transitions between different product demonstrations, idle attract modes, and visitor engagement states to ensure the booth maintained a compelling presence throughout the multi-day event.

Making Face Tracking Work on a Trade-Show Floor

The most demanding technical challenge was achieving reliable, high-quality face tracking and AR rendering in a live trade show environment. Unlike controlled studio conditions, the VivaTech exhibition floor presents constantly changing lighting, crowds of people moving through the camera frame, and visitors approaching from unpredictable angles. I developed a robust face detection pipeline that handles partial occlusion, varying skin tones, and rapid head movements while maintaining the tracking precision needed for convincing makeup overlay. The AR rendering system required custom compute shaders that perform facial landmark alignment, mesh deformation, and product texture mapping in real time at 60 FPS on large-format 4K displays. Color accuracy was critical for a beauty brand — virtual products needed to match their physical counterparts precisely, which required careful calibration of the rendering pipeline against reference swatches under the actual exhibition lighting. The system also needed to handle multiple simultaneous visitors, gracefully managing face detection priority and smooth transitions between participants without visual glitches or tracking jumps. Reliability was paramount, as the installation ran continuously for several days without technical supervision, requiring robust error handling, automatic recovery from edge cases, and thermal management for the hardware running under sustained computational load.

How It Ran

The installation ran for the full multi-day VivaTech event, handling continuous visitor traffic without requiring on-site technical intervention. Delivering a computer-vision-driven AR experience that had to hold up unsupervised in a live, uncontrolled trade-show environment, rather than a controlled demo setting, was the main test of this project, and it's the kind of high-stakes, real-time constraint I look for in installation work.