Co-founder Abandons Ship
HelloVR co-founder Carleton DiLeo left the company before the ill-fated IndieGogo campaign was devised. According to a post on DiLeos blog where he distances himself from MetaWorld, he isnt sure how Reid can deliver everything hes promised.
Last year, I began the journey to create MetaWorld. Being one of the first developers to use SpatialOS and being the first using it for VR was a huge challenge. Documentation was sparse and Improbable [the studio behind SpatialOS] was tied up growing their company. After a 3-4 months we had something to show to the world. The response was good, people who tried MetaWorld really connected with the world
Unfortunately, after the press showing, I ran into a number of issues with SpatialOS due to required version upgrades and bugs with SpatialOS itself. Improbable was busy with other things so they were unable to help. I slowly worked through some of the problems but progress was slow. I started to feel that making a massive VR experience wasnt going to be possible. At our current trajectory it would just take too long.
I still wanted to create something that allowed people to be able to visit a living world together from around the globe. To get there we would need more support from Improbable and a much bigger team. Funding efforts werent going well because investors wanted to see more before investing. The time required for one developer/game designer and a designer to create what we need would just take too long, we needed more help which costs money. This became a contention point between me and my business partner. Eventually I just didnt see a future in continuing the way we were. I decided to stop working on MetaWorld and focus on a new title called Community Garden. Community Garden would start small to prove the viability of building persistent VR worlds in SpatialOS.
I was surprised when I found out my partner had started an IndieGoGo fund. To avoid confusion, I wanted to make it clear that Im not currently working on MetaWorld and I dont know how my partner plans to deliver on the promise of the fund. If you plan on donating to the IndieGoGo fund, please note that none of the work I produced for the MetaWorld you see in videos like the one above is what will be delivered.