Thank you all for lighting the spark of the metaverse in 2018
Ever since I started working with virtual reality I’ve dreamed of the metaverse. A shared universe that feels like the real world at its core, but one where your only limitation is your imagination and skill, not the laws of physics.
A powerful universe which would reinvent the way we build social VR experiences and unify all kinds of creations, whether they’re games, silly fun items or scientific/engineering tools and visualizations. A universe that would be general enough to let all of these coexist in the same space and that would let us build them together from within.
It was an ambitious dream that I somehow got the opportunity to build thanks to help and contributions of many people. Starting with my co-founder Karel, who does his best to let me focus on building this awesome project, while he worries about everything else.
Thanks to the funding and support from The Rothenberg Ventures and their awesome team (Mike Rothenberg, Tipatat Chennavasin and Dylan Flinn just to name a few) who took us into their first VR accelerator, I could focus just on that for the past four years.
So I spent almost every single day laying the foundations for my vision of the metaverse, designing and building the foundational programming principles and building a brand new form of game engine and multiplayer networking from scratch just to support this ambitious idea.
As time went on and I kept working on layer after layer, I began thinking if it all would really be worth the effort and if anybody would ever use it. I would watch other companies get more funding and attention, while very few knew about my project and nobody used it regularly. I would wonder if my approach would ever pay off.
And now with the year 2018 over, I can happily say that it did thanks to you, our community.
Despite all the ambitious ideas and visions, I never imagined we’d have community this amazing and diverse. Just as our strength was fading, you came in and brought life to this project.
Your amazing creations have inspired me and others and shown all the different things you can do with Neos (many of which I didn’t even think of!). Your feedback and ideas helped shape the project and bring more new people with every update as I could focus on improving what mattered the most.
Your financial support on Patreon helped us stay afloat and pay the bills, while also giving us a great deal of motivation. Your guidance of newcomers and tutorials have made it easier for new people to get started and excited. And your evangelism and word of mouth helped grow the community even more.
You’re truly the best community that we could’ve ever wished for. Many of you became my friends and some we even brought onto the official team. As creator of Neos, nothing makes me more proud than seeing what others create with it and how it helps you in your life, regardless of what you do.
But what I’m particularly proud of is the diversity of people and creations that I’ve seen. We got everyone from casual users, hobbyist builders, developers, to business professionals and university teachers/researchers, all within the same universe, naturally working and interacting together.
It was one of the main goals of Neos, but the level of creative amplification this brought blew me away. For example several of our hobbyist creators would help the university researchers build their virtual experiments for science conferences. Or our younger users would help a professional with his UI design for particle systems and operate the camera for his tutorials, live in VR, despite being thousands of kilometers apart.
We could be working on a new world and discussing serious matters one moment and whip out a game of three player chess to play together the next. And then the university researcher would make himself into a chess piece, shrink himself down and run on our board.
I never expected work and fun to coexist so naturally inside of VR or for any of these things to happen so soon. But they did and they made the year 2018 the happiest one in my life so far.
All the things I experienced with you in VR gave me so much energy and motivation to continue this project for years ahead and brought joy to my life that I never had before. I want you to know that I appreciate it greatly.
We might not have big financial and promotional support like some other projects do right now, or a big team working on this (it’s still just me for the programming), but we do have a strong technical foundation for building inside of multiplayer VR that nothing else can rival and more importantly an incredible passionate community that can utilize this to create the most amazing things. And I believe that’s a lot more valuable going forward.
There’s still a lot of hard work ahead of us, but I believe the spark of Neos has been lit and next year is going to be even more amazing as a result. I can’t wait to see what will it bring and I can’t wait to show you what I have in store.
So thank you everyone very much for your support and lighting that spark. Let’s make it into a full flame this year. Let’s make 2019 the year of Neos.
Your Frooxius
P.S.: Also as a small thank you, everyone who joined Neos in 2018 (or earlier!) now gets a unique spark badge for their early support.
A powerful universe which would reinvent the way we build social VR experiences and unify all kinds of creations, whether they’re games, silly fun items or scientific/engineering tools and visualizations. A universe that would be general enough to let all of these coexist in the same space and that would let us build them together from within.
It was an ambitious dream that I somehow got the opportunity to build thanks to help and contributions of many people. Starting with my co-founder Karel, who does his best to let me focus on building this awesome project, while he worries about everything else.
Thanks to the funding and support from The Rothenberg Ventures and their awesome team (Mike Rothenberg, Tipatat Chennavasin and Dylan Flinn just to name a few) who took us into their first VR accelerator, I could focus just on that for the past four years.
So I spent almost every single day laying the foundations for my vision of the metaverse, designing and building the foundational programming principles and building a brand new form of game engine and multiplayer networking from scratch just to support this ambitious idea.
As time went on and I kept working on layer after layer, I began thinking if it all would really be worth the effort and if anybody would ever use it. I would watch other companies get more funding and attention, while very few knew about my project and nobody used it regularly. I would wonder if my approach would ever pay off.
And now with the year 2018 over, I can happily say that it did thanks to you, our community.
Despite all the ambitious ideas and visions, I never imagined we’d have community this amazing and diverse. Just as our strength was fading, you came in and brought life to this project.
Your amazing creations have inspired me and others and shown all the different things you can do with Neos (many of which I didn’t even think of!). Your feedback and ideas helped shape the project and bring more new people with every update as I could focus on improving what mattered the most.
Your financial support on Patreon helped us stay afloat and pay the bills, while also giving us a great deal of motivation. Your guidance of newcomers and tutorials have made it easier for new people to get started and excited. And your evangelism and word of mouth helped grow the community even more.
You’re truly the best community that we could’ve ever wished for. Many of you became my friends and some we even brought onto the official team. As creator of Neos, nothing makes me more proud than seeing what others create with it and how it helps you in your life, regardless of what you do.
But what I’m particularly proud of is the diversity of people and creations that I’ve seen. We got everyone from casual users, hobbyist builders, developers, to business professionals and university teachers/researchers, all within the same universe, naturally working and interacting together.
It was one of the main goals of Neos, but the level of creative amplification this brought blew me away. For example several of our hobbyist creators would help the university researchers build their virtual experiments for science conferences. Or our younger users would help a professional with his UI design for particle systems and operate the camera for his tutorials, live in VR, despite being thousands of kilometers apart.
We could be working on a new world and discussing serious matters one moment and whip out a game of three player chess to play together the next. And then the university researcher would make himself into a chess piece, shrink himself down and run on our board.
I never expected work and fun to coexist so naturally inside of VR or for any of these things to happen so soon. But they did and they made the year 2018 the happiest one in my life so far.
All the things I experienced with you in VR gave me so much energy and motivation to continue this project for years ahead and brought joy to my life that I never had before. I want you to know that I appreciate it greatly.
We might not have big financial and promotional support like some other projects do right now, or a big team working on this (it’s still just me for the programming), but we do have a strong technical foundation for building inside of multiplayer VR that nothing else can rival and more importantly an incredible passionate community that can utilize this to create the most amazing things. And I believe that’s a lot more valuable going forward.
There’s still a lot of hard work ahead of us, but I believe the spark of Neos has been lit and next year is going to be even more amazing as a result. I can’t wait to see what will it bring and I can’t wait to show you what I have in store.
So thank you everyone very much for your support and lighting that spark. Let’s make it into a full flame this year. Let’s make 2019 the year of Neos.
Your Frooxius
P.S.: Also as a small thank you, everyone who joined Neos in 2018 (or earlier!) now gets a unique spark badge for their early support.