ifIWasThere.ai

Inspiration

"There are 8 billion people on Earth, but only 80,000 seats in a World Cup Final stadium. ifIWasThere.ai uses AI to let anyone experience the moments they could never physically attend.

What it does

ifIWasThere.ai allows users to upload a selfie and instantly generate realistic media showing themselves inside famous events. Examples include: Watching the 2026 FIFA World Cup Final from the front row Celebrating inside a championship stadium after a winning goal Standing on the Olympic podium Attending sold-out concerts Experiencing historical or cultural moments The platform generates: AI photos AI videos Social-media-ready content Personalized event experiences The result feels like a memory that never existed—but could have.

How we built it

Our pipeline combines event understanding, scene reconstruction, and personalized generation.

1. User Upload Users upload a selfie or portrait photo.
2. Event Understanding We analyze the target event and identify: Venue structure Camera viewpoints Crowd behavior Lighting conditions Key visual elements
3. Scene Blueprint Generation A structured scene representation is created, including: Environment layout Crowd placement Event-specific atmosphere Camera composition
4. Personalized Insertion The user's identity is preserved while adapting: Pose Perspective Lighting Scale Facial consistency to match the generated scene.
5. AI Media Generation We use image and video generation models to create: Cinematic photos Short-form social videos Event-specific experiences Tech Stack Next.js Cloudflare Workers Cloudflare R2 AI image generation models AI video generation APIs Custom event-scene orchestration pipeline

Challenges we ran into

Identity Consistency Maintaining a user's facial identity across generated scenes and video frames was difficult. Realistic Event Atmosphere Large stadiums, concerts, and crowd scenes contain thousands of visual details that must remain coherent. Camera Composition Simply placing a user into a scene often looks fake. We needed to generate perspectives that feel like authentic fan photos and social-media content. Performance and Cost High-quality AI video generation remains expensive and time-consuming. Balancing quality, speed, and infrastructure costs was one of our biggest engineering challenges.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Turning "I wish I was there" into a product We transformed a universal human feeling into an interactive AI experience. Event-Scale Personalization Users can place themselves into experiences involving tens of thousands of people while still remaining the visual focus. Viral Content Potential Generated outputs are highly shareable because they combine: Personal identity Cultural moments Social storytelling End-to-End Experience From a single uploaded selfie to a completed personalized event video, the entire workflow is automated.

What we learned

People care less about photorealism than emotional realism. Users don't necessarily ask: "Is this technically perfect?" Instead they ask: "Does this feel like me?" We also learned that major events create powerful emotional anchors. When AI generation is connected to meaningful moments, engagement increases dramatically. Finally, we learned that personalization is becoming the next generation of content creation. People don't just want to watch content anymore—they want to be inside it.

What's next for ifIWasThere.ai

More Global Events Expanding beyond sports into: Concerts Festivals Award ceremonies Historical recreations Cultural celebrations Longer AI Videos Generating richer cinematic experiences rather than short clips. Dynamic Event Library Allowing users to choose from thousands of iconic moments. Community Sharing Creating a feed where users can share and discover generated experiences. Real-Time Experiences Eventually enabling users to place themselves into live and trending events shortly after they happen. Our Vision We believe AI can transform passive spectators into participants. Our goal is simple: No matter where you are, you should be able to experience the moments that define the world. That's why we're building ifIWasThere.ai.

Built With

• nextjs