What adidas wanted
adidas wanted people playing with the Boost line, not scrolling past it. The brief was an Instagram AR game filter with Boost at the centre of it — something that got people tapping, playing and sharing, with the shoe as the hero rather than another static product post. A product post asks someone to look. A game asks them to do something, then decide whether it was good enough to show a friend, which is a harder brief to answer.
The bit worth naming
Boost's whole pitch is bounce: energy return, the cushioning that gives something back when you land on it. That's a feeling, not a picture, and a filter is a picture unless you make someone do something with it. There's no haptic feedback in an Instagram game filter either — nothing pushes back against a thumb the way Boost pushes back against a foot. The whole sensation had to be carried by how something moves on screen, with nothing else to sell it. The job wasn't to show Boost bouncing. It was to make the person holding the phone feel like they were the one bouncing.
What we built
A gravity-defying game filter, playable straight from Instagram with nothing to download and nothing to learn — you land on it and you're already playing, no menu and no instructions screen in the way. The gameplay runs on a bounce and gravity mechanic: the shoe reacts the way Boost foam does, giving energy back rather than absorbing it flat. The product stays on screen and on-brand throughout, never demoted to a logo in the corner while the game happens elsewhere. Built quick and light, the way anything meant for a feed has to be — a filter that needs explaining has already lost most of an Instagram audience.
How it was made
The physics does the storytelling here. A bounce that reads as Boost rather than as a generic arcade jump has to feel like energy coming back, not gravity just pulling something down and up again — that's a tuning job as much as a build one, getting the rebound to sit somewhere between floaty and heavy until it stops feeling generic. The rest of it is restraint: keep the product visible and on-brand for the whole game rather than upstaged by it, and keep the loop short enough to hold up in a feed where nothing gets more than a few seconds of anyone's attention.
What happened
It shipped as an Instagram AR game filter, built around the Boost line and playable directly from the app, exactly where adidas wanted people finding it. Meta closed third-party Instagram and Facebook AR effects on 14 January 2025, so this one no longer runs where it launched. The build happened and the game ran there; the platform closed later.