DRAGON
CASE STUDY
Studio / Portfolio / House of the Dragon
HBO × Snapchat

House of the
Dragon AR

Snapchat Lens Location AR Snap AR Maps Narrative AR
100K+Impressions during premiere week
GlobalHouse of the Dragon launch
Snap MapLocation-based discovery
The brief

A dragon that belongs
to a real place.

Snapchat partnered with select AR creators worldwide to build location-based experiences tied to the launch of House of the Dragon Season 1. The brief was to create an AR lens anchored to a real landmark in India, discoverable inside Snap Map, that brought the world of the show to life in place.

Instead of placing a dragon on a famous monument like the obvious execution would have, we chose Sankagiri Hill Fort in Tamil Nadu because the location did the storytelling for us. A crumbling brick fort with deep historical weight reads as the same visual language as the HBO world. The environment was already the world.

The concept was simple: a sleeping dragon that only wakes when you move close enough. No UI, no prompts. Just the environment and the behaviour.

Client
HBO × Snapchat
Platform
Snapchat Lens Studio
Role
Creative Director · AR Lead
Campaign
Global House of the Dragon launch on Snap AR Maps
Year
2022
Deliverable
Location-based Snapchat lens anchored to Sankagiri Hill Fort, discovered on Snap Map.
In the space

What it looked like
at Sankagiri.

House of the Dragon AR dragon at Sankagiri Hill Fort Sankagiri Hill Fort
Sankagiri Hill Fort before the AR dragon wakes
Dragon awake inside the fort
Video
Snap AR Maps
Click to play
Process

Location before dragon.
Behaviour over spectacle.

01
Location before dragon
The brief asked for a location-based experience. The obvious path was to choose a famous monument and put the dragon there. The problem is famous landmarks already carry their own meaning. Sankagiri Hill Fort had no competing narrative, just brick and age. That gave the dragon room to belong.
02
Behaviour over spectacle
A roaring, flying dragon on command is a demo, not an experience. A sleeping dragon that reacts to how close you are is a relationship. Proximity as the trigger meant the user's own movement became the story. You choose when to wake it.
03
Environment as costume
We did not need branded overlays or title cards. The fort's texture, its scale, and its visible history put you in the world before the AR launched. The dragon was not placed on top of a location. It was placed inside one that already looked like it belonged there.
The result

A quiet dragon that still
carried the campaign.

100K+ Impressions across geofenced cities during premiere week
Global Part of Snapchat's worldwide House of the Dragon launch
Snap Map Location-based discovery — the dragon finds you
Location is a creative decision
Choosing Sankagiri over a more prominent monument was the most important creative call on this project. The location's inherent atmosphere carried most of the storytelling before any AR was rendered.
Proximity is underused interaction design
Most AR lenses use tap or face triggers. Proximity tied the mechanic to the physical space, which is the entire point of location-based AR. The behaviour change rewarded being present in a way a tap never could.
Restraint can win the pitch
The winning concept was the quietest of the ideas pitched. A sleeping dragon is a harder sell than a flying one. It won because the reasoning was clear, and the reasoning came from the environment, not the technology.
The world the user stands in matters most
XR works best when the physical context and the digital layer share a logic. When they do, augmentation feels inevitable rather than applied.
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