Woah that was a trip.
In early 2017, I finished up previoius VR project, SceneVR. I had been working on that multiuser VR project for about 2 years on and off, building technology that came to influence A-Frame, and prototyped a huge number of VR interactions and how they could work well on the web.
However, I never could get my head around the next step of what a VR based world would need to thrive, some way of sharing ownership of objects and it not being a walled garden controlled by one company.
It wasn’t until mid 2017 that I came across Decentraland, an Argentinean project to build a virtual reality world that runs on the blockchain (via ethereum contracts that specify who owns a piece of virtual land). It was an awesome idea, and inspired me to build Fontus, an A-Frame powered engine that had land ownership as an ethereum contract (I actually based my solidity contract off the hilarious Pixelmap) and multiuser voice chat.
I was on the verge of publishing the final contract for Fontus and starting to sell parcels of land, when Ari and Esteban at Decentraland got in contact with me and asked if I’d like to work with them. So they acquired the Fontus assets, hired me and we started work on building the Decentraland client.
In the time I’ve been working at Decentraland, I’ve seen them go through a successful terraform and land auctioning process, build up a huge community (26k followers on twitter?) and had an inside view of working at a company that has successfully ICO’d. I also got to visit Buenos Aires and meet the team and have many asados.
However, working remotely with a team in Buenos Aires has been hard with only 1-2 hours per day cross over, and as the team in BA has grown and we’ve got most of the Fontus assets over, I’ve been looking for something in a more compatible time zone (I’m in Wellington, New Zealand).
Also, with other exciting life stuff happening, I’ve decided to finish up with Decentraland in mid March, and take a month off. 🎈
I’m going to keep working in the WebGL / Ethereum / Node.js world, so if you have a project in Australia / West coast US and would like a passionate developer / product designer, fire me an email! ✉️
Peace. ✌️
