Turning Trade Show Traffic into Conversations with an AI Photo Booth

Project in a Nutshell: The AI Photo Booth is an in-house hardware–software solution developed by Promwad to increase engagement and qualified foot traffic at trade fairs and industry events. Instead of static displays with PCBs, datasheets, and hardware demos, it invites visitors into a short interactive session and sends them away with a personalised, branded photo, making it easier to start a conversation with engineers and the sales team. The first version was deployed at the 2025 editions of Embedded World, ANGA COM, and IBC, where it helped attract visitors to the stand and led to many concrete discussions about their tasks and possible projects.

Challenge

At large tech exhibitions, many booths are covered with PCBs, schematics, and complex demos. People walk past, recognise the logo, but rarely stop to talk. Promwad needed something on the stand that would start conversations on its own, without extra staff or a separate IT setup for every show. The solution had to work offline on unstable exhibition networks, accommodate different booth layouts, and provide visitors with a small branded photo to take away as a reminder of Promwad and its engineering work.

Business Value

For marketing and event teams, the AI Photo Booth is a ready-made tool to get more value from stand and event budgets.

Each 30–60-second session is a short, scripted interaction. During this time you can easily ask one key question, run a micro-survey, or collect a contact, and the booth can handle dozens or even hundreds of these sessions per day.

Because all processing runs locally, it does not require cloud infrastructure or changes on the client’s IT side. The same hardware can travel from event to event. At the same time, only the visuals — characters, branding, interface language, partner logos — are updated, so the booth becomes a long-term asset that pays back over several exhibition and promo cycles.

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Solution

Promwad built an AI Photo Booth — a compact booth device that lets visitors pick a character or mood and see their face transformed in a few seconds. Instead of just looking at hardware on the stand, guests leave with a personal, branded photo that naturally leads into a conversation about projects.

All processing runs on the local computer inside the booth. It responds quickly, does not send images to the cloud, and keeps working even when the exhibition network is overloaded.

The platform can be fully tailored for each event:

add custom characters, moods, or IP-based personalities;

apply branded overlays and templates;

adjust the on-screen menu to match the event theme and company style;

localise content for different languages and regions.

Architecture & Platform Flexibility

The AI Photo Booth is built as a modular platform that can run on different hardware setups:

x86 or ARM (including single-board computers);

CPU-only or GPU-accelerated configurations, depending on performance needs.

This design lets Promwad reuse the same platform across events, scale computing power when needed, and keep the experience fast, responsive, and fun for visitors.

Results at Exhibitions

At Embedded World, ANGA COM, and IBC exhibitions, the AI photo booth was a standout feature of the Promwad stand. Visitors stopped to try it out, showed photos to their colleagues, and often stayed at the stand while their images were being prepared, which gave the team time to strike up a conversation.

Visitors carried printed photos and small branded gifts around the exhibition centre, so the Promwad logo and images from the stand appeared in other areas of the exhibition. For the team, this meant not just a glance at the stand, but specific conversations about visitors' tasks and where Promwad could be helpful.

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