Revisit | Devpost

Inspiration

TL;DR:

A sci-fi nerd, inspired by travel and our previous Portal app, wants to time travel through a VR anywhere-portal and manipulate time(dragging time rifts to compare past and present) in the most immersive way possible.

By Jade's AI (because apparently I needed an AI to summarize me, lol)

Full Version:

Hi, I'm Jade, a huge fan of all kinds of sci-fi works and never stop being curious about Many-worlds in many ways(bad pun, lol): the origin, history, future, different universes and civilizations...Endless fantasies to be dreamed and made. Also, I love being creative and hate boring things. I guess that might be what pulls me into the VR industry, and it's so exciting for me to be able to make some of my dreams literally come true in VR.

My first Quest App with my fellas is also an Exploration App: you could become Doctor Strange or Doctor Who for a moment, opening a portal and stepping anywhere you want in an instant, mostly 3D environments by artists and user-generated 360 panoramas with AI. It didn't work out as well as I'd expected, mainly due to content volume and image quality, but it planted a big idea I guess.

As a nature lover, I also enjoy traveling around, which is naturally a killing category for VR. One day, while exploring popular travel apps feeling both amazed and a little lost about my own project, an idea popped up: what if there was a time travel portal, where the past and present are connected by a door, and I can move the door position to compare different parts of two eras? And the content would come from...Google street view, of course! So I started prototyping it and it struck me that wouldn't it be a lot more convenient if I can just scan the street to reveal the past? OK that's how I'll do it!

What it does

Time travel intuitively and effortlessly in VR: Simply drag the time rift to compare now and then, witness the changes of anywhere where google street view is covered, and actually feel time moving. Discover and rediscover the beauty of your life moments in this huge, messy, lovely world.

Meanwhile, travel anywhere you want, and immerse yourself in every possible way.

Last but not least, record the footprints of your life journey, and fill up on geo-culture knowledge while touring.

How we built it

I pitched the prototype to my fellas and they agreed to make it a demo feature into Portal App, though we were so short on people and time. Luckily we got some positive feedback after it came out so we decided to make it a new independent App.

Challenges we ran into

It took us 2 months to make things really work(should've been 1 month as planned, lol). There were and still are many tough challenges for this little inexperienced indie team, including but not limited to:

The effects of time rifts.
The resolution of the image.
All kinds of strange network errors which are extremely hard to reproduce...
Dev personnel change: people come, people go...
- I've tested like 60+ beta versions with my fellas during development, and that's the real 'mind-blowing' part, right? lmao.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The effects of time rifts finally work.

We made the concept live, not in the most perfect way yet, but alive.

This lil' App finally thrive after the tough labour, and will continue to grow with us thanks to user support.

What we learned

Experience, Think, Communicate, Create, Overcome, Achieve.

Hands left, hands returned, but the work never stopped.

What's next for Revisit

Street View Navigation will be released recently. Yet so many things to do on my roadmap, wish we had enough dev hands to tick them off one by one: