Horang Studio
A personalized profile-photo generation service for the Korea University festival, built with a diffusion-based AI pipeline and deployed for thousands of students.
Motivation
Korea University is, perhaps with only slight exaggeration, a place where every day feels like a festival. Beginning with our unique cheering culture, we have cheering orientation sessions where upperclassmen teach the official chants, joint cheering events with Yonsei University, the annual Korea–Yonsei rivalry, the spring Daedong Festival, Ipsilentti, Teulsilentti, Nokdu Festival, Hosang Festival, open-air concerts, the 418 Marathon, Haeoreum Festival, club fairs, student union events, freshman retreats, departmental welcome parties, and countless other traditions that would stretch well beyond a month.
There is a stereotype that developers tend to be quiet, introverted, and rarely show up at social events. Fortunately, GDGoC KU broke that mold entirely. We were a community that took both engineering and friendship seriously, never missing a single festival and refusing to go home until reaching a proper alcohol high at the after-parties. In other words, we were developers who fully embraced campus culture.
Horang Studio began after one of these festivals. We were gathered at a bar near campus, talking about exaggerated startup ideas the way we often did. At the time, photobooths were trending at festivals, Instagram was full of event-themed filters, and Gen-Z students were constantly posting photo dumps and Stories. AI-generated graduation portraits from services like Snow and EpicAI were also becoming popular. During those conversations, we realized that Korea University’s strong visual identity, such as crimson, tigers, and our cheering culture, could serve as a perfect foundation for personalized profile photos. These elements immediately evoke a sense of belonging for anyone in our community.
For Korea University students, festivals and sports events are more than casual entertainment. They are moments when we reaffirm our collective identity and actively create new cultural expressions. Horang Studio emerged from this context. It was both an experiment and a service built around a simple question.
What if a personal photo could be more than a record of myself? What if it could visually represent the community I belong to?
Motivated by this question, we created a deep-learning–based image generation pipeline that could operate directly within the festival environment. Using our university’s symbolic motifs, we designed a service that generated personalized profile images based on each user’s real face.
Horang Studio was first launched during the 2023 Korea–Yonsei rivalry events and then relaunched at the 2024 Kutopia spring festival. Through this project, we explored how AI could function not just as a technical tool but also as a medium that shapes cultural experiences on campus.
My Role
Technical Overview
Version 1
Version 2.
Results
