A few of you might have noticed that the Virtuali-Tee app went down for a couple of days before the weekend. If you try the app again today you might notice that you need to update to get it working. It will work now, don’t worry, and we apologise for any issues caused. We had hundreds of people get in touch with us and it’s the first time this has happened in over 4 years of running the company so for that, we’re sorry.
Update on IOS / Update on Android
In the end we resolved the issue within 48 hours of first noticing it and chose this as an opportunity to ship a major behind the scenes update. You’ll notice the version number is now 1.8.1 but there’s a lot that’s happened under the surface.
The app should work and look the same but you might notice a few small changes. Under the hood a lot has gone on to make sure the app serves as a better platform on which to develop on top of over the course of this year and beyond.
The first major change is swapping out the tracking engine. This should mean performance is far less jittery and more stable. It should work very similarly to before but if you have anything here you’d like us to improve, let us know.
This change was necessary in order to satisfy new Play Store requirements from Google and continued selfie camera functionality, which I know for a lot of you is one of the key use cases of the product. It’s personally my most used feature. We’re potentially the only app or at least one of a handful of AR apps that uses the selfie camera in this way and in my opinion it’s essential to the product so we’ve done a lot of work to make sure we continue to support this long into the future.
The second major change you’ll notice is that we’ve removed the VR mode. This wasn’t a particularly easy decision for us but was a decision we had to make due to the fast pace of technological change resulting in some of the VR code no longer being actively supported by hardware manufacturers and a relatively low number of users regularly using this feature.
Cumulatively these changes are going to provide a much stronger, future-compatible base on which we can develop on top of. One that can move with advancements in AR technology. We’re looking forward to getting back to adding exciting new features over the coming months.
Suffice to say, at the end of a long technical explanation, we’ve got some cool features in the pipeline to make the app a whole load better.
If you’d like to help us decide on our next features, we’d encourage you to join our new Curiscope community on Facebook.
-Ed