How Alibaba Cloud’s AI‑Cam Transforms NBA Fan Experience with Real‑Time AIGC
NBA China and Alibaba Cloud teamed up to launch an AI‑driven fan interaction platform that captures fans in real time, generates personalized AI figurines, and delivers a seamless online‑offline experience powered by advanced AIGC models and a high‑concurrency cloud architecture.
NBA China and Alibaba Cloud announced a multi‑year partnership to reshape Chinese fans' experience using artificial intelligence and cloud technology.
On October 10, the NBA China 2025 season opener launched the "My NBA AI Figurine" project, featuring the first NBA AI‑Cam that captures fans wearing jerseys and instantly generates AI figurine images presented as collectible blind boxes, with additional interactive installations at NBA House.
The NBA app also launched the AI figurine activity, allowing fans to upload a selfie and, using AIGC, customize jerseys, actions, backgrounds, and unlock player pose, generating a chibi‑style AI figurine.
Partner apps Tongyi and Quark offered the same AI figurine theme, enabling fans to participate online.
The interaction is built with the Tongyi large model and Alibaba Cloud PAI platform. The AI workflow precisely reproduces fan features, including jersey logos, while PAI‑ArtLab provides a cloud‑based ComfyUI editing environment and elastic model services.
Full‑stack AIGC deployment: Using PAI‑ArtLab ComfyUI workflow, Qwen2.5_VL for photo recognition, and Qwen‑Image‑Edit for image generation, ensuring high fidelity of jerseys, poses, and props.
High‑concurrency service architecture: Hundreds of service instances form a highly available, elastically scalable AIGC compute cluster that supports millions of concurrent users.
Generation efficiency: Average AI figurine creation time is kept under 40 seconds per image.
Unified multi‑platform access: Standardized ComfyUI API integrates NBA App, Quark App, and Tongyi App.
Cross‑scene experience loop: Online generated figurines can be shared to social media; offline NBA House provides AIGC kiosks for photo‑to‑figurine‑to‑card workflow.
PAI‑ArtLab is Alibaba Cloud’s AI platform offering a one‑stop AIGC design solution, supporting Stable Diffusion, ComfyUI, Kohya, dataset and model management, training, AI image generation, design agents, custom tool deployment, and enterprise‑grade security.
In September 2025, PAI‑ArtLab released the AI Design Agent, allowing natural‑language commands to generate high‑quality images, videos, and fine‑tuned edits, dramatically lowering creative barriers with AI‑generated media, web search, custom tools, and enterprise security.
Alibaba Cloud Big Data AI Platform
The Alibaba Cloud Big Data AI Platform builds on Alibaba’s leading cloud infrastructure, big‑data and AI engineering capabilities, scenario algorithms, and extensive industry experience to offer enterprises and developers a one‑stop, cloud‑native big‑data and AI capability suite. It boosts AI development efficiency, enables large‑scale AI deployment across industries, and drives business value.
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