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Heineken F1 Vegas, Smiledrop
2024 + 2025
The experience itself was three seconds long in terms of what the participant had to think about: sit down, count to three, race. The system behind it was anything but simple. The moment a participant entered the cockpit, a camera captured their entire simulated race run. That footage was simultaneously fed to a real-time editing pipeline alongside professional event camera footage from across the venue. Within seconds, not minutes, seconds, a finished, polished, personalized race video was delivered directly to the participant's phone via a custom-built app. Movie-quality content. Their moment. Immediately theirs to keep, share, and post.
Beyond the cockpit, I deployed multiple "moment makers" across the entire venue, capture points designed to catch the kinds of spontaneous, cinematic fan moments that normally only exist in memory. All of that footage flowed to a live editor simultaneously, ensuring every attendee had access to a highlight package by the end of the day.
This was Smiledrop System 1: the first version of an R&D platform I created to answer a question that had been sitting in my head for years. Professional content creation has always belonged to professionals, the people with the cameras, the editors, the infrastructure.
Why? A live event is full of real moments, real emotion, real story. The technology to capture it beautifully and deliver it instantly already exists. The only thing missing was a system designed from the ground up to do exactly that, invisibly, at scale, for everyone in the room. That's what I built. Every attendee a star. Every attendee a director. No one needs to know how it worked.