Build Story · Portfolio ride · EN / BG
VRE Ride: a night train instead of a pitch deck
A scroll-driven night train for VR Express: each stop is a buyer's problem, each answer a world you step into.
In one look
The problem
A buyer who hasn't tried a headset can't picture what VR would do for them, and a deck of 40 slides or a grid of logos doesn't help.
What we built
A night-train scroll story with ten stops. Each stop is a buyer's problem: finding people, training that takes too long, doctors tired of slides, events that don't impress, a showroom with no app. The answer is a world you dive into, shown as an illustrated demo frame. The last stop links to the studio's brief builder.
Where it is now
Live at ride.vrexpress.io in English and Bulgarian. Version 1, the sideways train, is the page search engines index. Version 2, a 36-second first-person scroll film, runs on its own pages and is not indexed. The dives are demo frames, not client footage.
What this would have cost in 2024
About $7.7k and 3–5 weeks
2024 team: 2 people: a frontend and motion developer, and an illustrator-animator. Built here by one founder working with AI in 2 days.
| Piece | 2024 hours |
|---|---|
| Ten-chapter sideways scroll story: pinned track, parallax, chapter index, keyboard and phone handling, reduced-motion fallback | ~59 |
| Art and motion: 21 illustrated plates and cutouts, a headset-train hero, a 6 s hero loop, share cards | ~63 |
| Bulgarian and English versions, language switch, search and share metadata | ~17 |
| Version 2: a 36 s first-person film from six video segments, with a scroll-scrub engine for desktop and phone | ~67 |
| Total (PERT) | ~205 |
Method: PERT (O+4M+P)/6 per piece; low = O × $25, likely = PERT × $37.5, high = P × $50 (Accelerance 2024 Eastern-Europe band). These are estimates of what a team would have needed in 2024, not invoices.
How it was built
From first commit to current build in 2 days
- Five concepts, one pick
A research note compared five train stories: a window seat, six metro lines, a carriage cutaway, a long track through XR history, and a passenger with a pitch deck. The founder picked the passenger. Each stop is a buyer's problem, and a page of the deck flies out of the window at each dive.
5 concepts compared · 10 chapters - Built on an earlier scroll engine
A remix of an earlier scroll-story project kept its pinned horizontal track, parallax and phone handling, and swapped in the new story. The page went live after two builds. Then came a Bulgarian version, the real logo and a hero of the train wearing a headset. Two hero animations were tried behind a preview switch; one was kept, one dropped. A figure that flashed during dives and chapters that skipped on phones were fixed.
21 generated images and a hero loop · builds 1–9 in about 23 hours - Version 2: through the portals
The founder judged version 1 a spectator slideshow with no cause and effect. Version 2 makes the viewer the person in the headset: one first-person shot through five worlds, driven by the scroll. Six AI-generated video segments make the film. It started as image frames and became a scrubbed video once it felt laggy. The cursor lens was removed because it covered the headlines.
6 video segments · 36 s film - Tied into the main site
The studio site now links to the ride, and the ride shows a small 'back to VR Express' link to visitors who arrive from it. Both versions were checked live.
Who did what
The founder decided
- Version 1 stays indexed while version 2 is built beside it, on separate pages that are not indexed.
- The cursor lens is gone: it covered the headlines and gave the viewer nothing.
- The dives are labelled as demo frames, not passed off as client footage.
- Numbers on screen come from verified records, with no percentage claims.
AI built and checked
- The site, built in Lovable from 13 numbered briefs written with Claude. Each brief listed checks the builder had to pass before it edited anything.
- The art: 21 images, a hero loop and the six film segments, generated with image and video models.
Stack
Want something like this for your team?
From one call to something live. The same method is in the Claude Operator Pack.
From the founder
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