EarthLight Foundation & The CHIVE – SXSW ’23 Experience Design

For SXSW 2023, Dreamspace created a technology-driven live experience for the EarthLight Foundation that blended AI interaction, augmented reality, and event storytelling into one memorable public activation. Designed to spark curiosity and conversation, the experience brought together emerging technology, space-inspired imagination, and celebrity presence in an engagement-driven format.

The EarthLight Foundation is centered on a mission to protect and expand life beyond Earth, which gave the event a uniquely visionary context. Dreamspace translated that ambition into a live audience experience that felt playful, future-facing, and culturally relevant during one of the most attention-heavy weeks in Austin. Rather than relying on a conventional event format, the activation used interactive technology to make the theme feel immediate and participatory.

SXSW is crowded, fast-moving, and full of brand experiences competing for attention. The challenge was to create something that would stop people, pull them in, and give them a reason to engage rather than just observe. The experience also needed to resonate with a tech-forward audience while reinforcing the event’s broader mission of space, imagination, and the future of humanity.

Dreamspace approached the activation as a creative technology showcase built around participation. The goal was to take a recognizable event format and elevate it with interactive systems that felt surprising, social, and highly shareable. By combining AI-driven transformation with augmented reality storytelling, the event became more than a gathering. It became a live demonstration of how emerging technology can deepen audience engagement.

One of the signature moments was a custom AI photo booth experience that allowed attendees to momentarily transform into William Shatner. This reimagined the familiar photo booth into something more theatrical and conversational, giving guests a direct interaction point that felt personal, unexpected, and distinctly tied to the event theme. It also created a natural source of buzz, social sharing, and on-site participation.

Dreamspace also created an AR holographic experience using 8th Wall, extending the event’s world-building through a mobile-first layer of immersive interaction. The augmented reality component drew attendees deeper into the space-inspired narrative and added a second layer of discovery beyond the physical environment. This helped the experience feel more dimensional and aligned with the foundation’s forward-looking spirit.

The activation worked because it gave people something to do, not just something to look at. The AI and AR elements created a stronger feedback loop between audience, environment, and theme, encouraging conversation and increasing dwell time. Combined with William Shatner’s appearance at the event, the experience became a memorable SXSW moment that merged pop-culture recognition with technology-driven storytelling.

The final experience gave the EarthLight Foundation a more visible and distinctive presence during SXSW 2023. By using AI and AR as audience-facing tools rather than background effects, Dreamspace helped create an event that felt immersive, playful, and mission-aligned. The result was a technology-forward experience that drew people in, sparked interaction, and translated a big idea into something live audiences could actually feel.