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"The Academy Awards'\u00A0#MyOscarPhoto campaign, powered by Livefyre and Twitter,\u00A0offers a good look at the power of Livefyre's platform and its ability to use technology and social media to connect fans with their favorite celebrities.\r\n\r\nAward shows are becoming a prime site for testing offline-to-online social integrations. Twitter, for instance, has been taking its 360-degree Vine booth and Twitter Mirror around to red carpet events like the Golden Globes and the Grammys. Livefyre is upping the stakes at this year\u2019s Academy Awards.\r\n\r\nWhen it debuts this Sunday, the #MyOscarPhoto booth will take selfies tweeted by fans, display them at a rate of 10 images per second next to a celebrity, snap a photo with a slow motion camera, and then tweet it back out to individuals. It\u2019s a clever trick that gives users a neat point of contact with a movie star while using technology to make the experience seamless for the performer.\r\nIntroducing #MyOscarPhoto -- your chance to see yourself on the red carpet at the #Oscars! http://t.co/8Nx5wTNjMb pic.twitter.com/nhbdeYoBoX\r\n\r\n\u2014 The Academy (@TheAcademy) February 25, 2014\r\nThe sheer ambition of the setup got our attention, so we chatted with Livefyre CEO Jordan Kretchmer to learn more about how Livefyre built the booth.\r\n\r\n\u201CIt\u2019s definitely the most interesting thing I\u2019ve ever worked on,\u201D Kretchmer said, adding that it was also the most intensive.\r\n\r\nTo build the booth, Livefyre tapped its StreamHub platform to aggregate all the user photos from Twitter. It then reworked an Image Gallery app to enable it to stream those photos onto a TV in 10-second bursts at 10 frames per second. An algorithm then uses histogram analysis to take the resulting video file and chop it up into frames for each user. Each image is then rematched with the metadata from users\u2019 original tweets and combined with the celebrity\u2019s name. In the final step, human moderators double-check the automated work before approving the images to go back out as tweets.\r\n\r\nThe whole interaction is hardly deep social engagement, but it is perfectly situated to delight users.\r\n\r\nLivefyre\u2019s focus on creating scalable realtime infrastructure for real-world events is paying off. The startup certainly has experience with scale, now that it hosts over 2 billion page views a month, but #MyOscarPhoto is the most ambitious custom project yet for the company's platform.\r\n\r\nThe implementation might get reused at future events, like the Country Music Awards, but Kretchmer said he\u2019s more interested in using the project to showcase the kinds of custom real-time streaming applications that can be built on Livefyre\u2019s infrastructure. According to him, the company built the installation in just two weeks.\r\n\r\n\u201CI think we\u2019ll start to see a lot of other interesting use cases like this that aren\u2019t exactly this execution,\u201D he added.\r\n\r\nAs social media becomes an increasingly important part of mainstream events like the Super Bowl and the Oscars, firms like Livefyre are establishing the infrastructure required to bridge the offline and online worlds. Even if faux celebrity selfies aren\u2019t your thing, the #MyOscarPhoto campaign offers an interesting glimpse at the future of social.\r\n\r\nImage credit: Joe Klamar / AFP / Getty Images"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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