Ajar

Inspirati# Ajar — Make your brand a world.

Inspiration

Brands spend six figures on pop-ups that reach a few thousand people, in one city, for three weeks — and can't measure any of it. Meanwhile every poster, shelf and product page they already pay for is a dead end. We asked: what if the poster wasn't the end of the ad, but the door? Real-time world models finally make that possible from photography the brand already owns.

What it does

Ajar turns any placement into a Door. Scan a QR on a Coach poster and you step into Coach's London: pick your neighbourhood, your chapter, your bag, your name — then walk a live-generated street to the Coach store, see yourself wearing the look in a live mirror, and leave with a 9-second personalised film. Everything behind the door is observed — who came in, where they went, what they reached for. That's Footfall: the first honest attribution layer for brand advertising.

How we built it

• Reactor lingbot-world-2 — image-anchored navigable world; the street you walk through, steered live by your chosen chapter.
• Reactor x2 — reference-guided live video; the in-store try-on mirror.
• Reactor ltx2 — selfie + script → lip-synced film with audio in one pass.
• Modal — FastAPI backend, session state in modal.Dict, background generation jobs.
• Vite + React + TypeScript + Tailwind on Vercel — phone flow at /play, projector dashboard at /dash.
• Anchor stills and look boards pre-generated so the live path has something to fall back on.

Built in five hours by three people plus coding agents.

Challenges we ran into

• Presence is fragile. Stutter kills the illusion faster than low resolution — we tiered the experience: pre-rendered path for browsing, live generation reserved for those who engage.
• Brand safety vs. generation. Legal will never approve unbounded output. We anchored on approved photography, ran the camera on a fixed path, and built a fallback to reviewed footage on drift.
• Permissions choreography. Camera, gyro and audio each need a gesture at exactly the right moment on mobile, or the flow dies before the world loads.
• Cost per session is the whole business — every design decision had to survive that number.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• A working end-to-end door: physical poster → QR → personalised, walkable world → try-on → film, on a phone, in under 90 seconds.
• Three Reactor models composed into one continuous experience, not three demos.
• A business case that argues on one ratio — cost per minute of voluntary attention — and concedes honestly where video still wins.

What we learned

• Insertion beats destination. Nobody visits a virtual store; everybody is already standing in front of a poster.
• World models are ready for bounded, brand-owned imagery — the constraint is the feature, not the limitation.
• The pilot is the product: one brand, one world, three success criteria, a control, and a renewal clause.

What's next for Ajar

• Footfall dashboard as a real product: session-level behaviour, variant performance, reservation chain.
• Ajar Studio: one anchor image → every localised and seasonal variant, no re-shoot.
• Lock down true cost per engaged session with Reactor, then run a six-week pilot with one brand on placements already live.
• Steer every deal from campaign to always-on — a world that stays open. on

What it does

Ajar turns any placement into a Door. Scan a QR on a Coach poster and you step into Coach's London: pick your neighbourhood, your chapter, your bag, your name — then walk a live-generated street to the Coach store, see yourself wearing the look in a live mirror, and leave with a 9-second personalised film. Everything behind the door is observed — who came in, where they went, what they reached for. That's Footfall: the first honest attribution layer for brand advertising.

How we built it

• Reactor lingbot-world-2 — image-anchored navigable world; the street you walk through, steered live by your chosen chapter.
• Reactor x2 — reference-guided live video; the in-store try-on mirror.
• Reactor ltx2 — selfie + script → lip-synced film with audio in one pass.
• Modal — FastAPI backend, session state in modal.Dict, background generation jobs.
• Vite + React + TypeScript + Tailwind on Vercel — phone flow at /play, projector dashboard at /dash.
• Anchor stills and look boards pre-generated so the live path has something to fall back on.

Built in five hours by three people plus coding agents.

Challenges we ran into

• Presence is fragile. Stutter kills the illusion faster than low resolution — we tiered the experience: pre-rendered path for browsing, live generation reserved for those who engage.
• Brand safety vs. generation. Legal will never approve unbounded output. We anchored on approved photography, ran the camera on a fixed path, and built a fallback to reviewed footage on drift.
• Permissions choreography. Camera, gyro and audio each need a gesture at exactly the right moment on mobile, or the flow dies before the world loads.
• Cost per session is the whole business — every design decision had to survive that number.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• A working end-to-end door: physical poster → QR → personalised, walkable world → try-on → film, on a phone, in under 90 seconds.
• Three Reactor models composed into one continuous experience, not three demos.
• A business case that argues on one ratio — cost per minute of voluntary attention — and concedes honestly where video still wins.

What we learned

• Insertion beats destination. Nobody visits a virtual store; everybody is already standing in front of a poster.
• World models are ready for bounded, brand-owned imagery — the constraint is the feature, not the limitation.
• The pilot is the product: one brand, one world, three success criteria, a control, and a renewal clause.

What's next for Ajar

• Footfall dashboard as a real product: session-level behaviour, variant performance, reservation chain.
• Ajar Studio: one anchor image → every localised and seasonal variant, no re-shoot.
• Lock down true cost per engaged session with Reactor, then run a six-week pilot with one brand on placements already live.
• Steer every deal from campaign to always-on — a world that stays open.

Built With

• devin
• reactor