What PUMA wanted
PUMA and the Amsterdam agency Provoke were launching the PUMA Rider, and a sneaker drop is easy to scroll past. Another product shot in the feed, another swipe. They wanted people to stop on the shoe rather than just see it, to do something with it instead of double-tapping and moving on to the next post. The brief, in plain terms: make the Rider launch something people would actually play, not just look at.
The constraint worth naming
Whatever we built had to run inside Instagram, on whatever phone was already in someone's hand, with nothing to download and nothing to press. No app store, no login, no controller. The only input was a face in front of a camera, and that rules out a lot of what normally makes a game a game. Steering, scoring and any reason to replay it all had to come from head movement alone, tracked well enough through a phone's front camera that it felt responsive rather than fiddly. Get that wrong and people close it in the first few seconds; get it right and they run it again to beat their own score. There was also no second attempt at a first impression here — an Instagram AR game filter either grabs someone in the moment they open it or it doesn't, there's no loading screen to buy time.
What we built
A face-controlled AR game with the PUMA Rider as the hero, playable straight from an Instagram camera.
- Tilt and move your head to steer down the track. No buttons, just you.
- The shoe stays front and centre the whole way through, wrapped in the campaign look.
- Points, power-ups and a skill rank give people a reason to run it again and try to beat themselves.
- A branded track, obstacles and a hashtag banner, built so a good run was worth sharing back into the feed it came from.
How it was made
The Rider was modelled and animated in 3D first, so it could carry the campaign look at every angle a head-steered camera might catch it from. That model was then rigged into a face-tracking filter, so a tilt of the head became the steer rather than a finger on the screen. Getting that translation to feel clean instead of twitchy or laggy was the actual engineering problem sitting under what looks, from the outside, like a simple game — face tracking has to read small, fast, slightly different movements from every player and turn them into the same smooth steer every time.
What happened
It shipped as an Instagram AR game filter for the PUMA Rider launch, built with Provoke. Meta closed third-party AR effects on Instagram and Facebook on 14 January 2025, so this one no longer runs where it launched. The work happened, and the platform it depended on closed later.