As a quick project update for today's status, I managed to get everything setup for the bank accounts to tie to paypal and Amazon payments so that I can successfully launch the project. Also, I finished some preliminary dev to migrate from fractwall to darklabyrinths, but I hope to actually update the github tomorrow with a push of the current prototype, as well as to release at leas the skeleton for the website. I reached out to my associate David, and I'm hoping that he can help with some of the page design and layout, so that I can concentrate on core functionality.
Just to help with rankings on the topic, I'm publishing the full text to the current Kickstarter project text so that search engines will start registering the topic, helping me drive the viral message when the project launches.
The Billion Dollar Labyrinth: claim your piece of Internet history today and own your own virtual-estate in DarkLabyrinths!
“Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes -- I mean the universe -- but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.”
~ Galileo Galilei
Project Overview
DarkLabyrinths is a truly once-in-a-decade opportunity!
For as little as a $10 contribution in showing your support, you can put your own image on a wall and claim your own virtual-estate (as opposed to real-estate) in DarkLabyrinths today. The DarkLabyrinths runs right in the browser from the cloud, free of downloads or plugins and is guaranteed to be online for between 10 to 20 years (depending upon funding success).
Moreover, after reading the supporting documents and viewing the prototype it takes little imagination to clearly see how you can, with little-to-no risk, literally grow the value of your reward or perk up to 1000-fold within just a few short months--transforming a million-dollar-labyrinth offering into a billion-dollar-labyrinth through viral growth and word-of-mouth--and all this while helping to support an amazing technology and a great Open Source community in the process.
What it is NOT
DarkLabyrinths is NOT a complete shared world, like SecondLife; it’s not a first-person shooter, or a game in any traditional sense of the word at all. Although the technologies developed and championed under DarkLabyrinths label would certainly help such applications evolve, this is not purpose of the project to create a fully-immersive world or game.
DarkLabyrinths is also NOT a website or an online community. Although most of the money raised will go into escrow that directly support specific online communities (as opposed to an individual or self-interested corporation), the project deliverable is a completed application that provides online virtual-estates and management.
Also noteworthy is the clarification that DarkLabryinths is NOT real-estate (prohibited by Kickstarter TOS), but virtual-estate, which is allowed.
Finally, DarkLabyrinths is NOT rocket science. Although these technologies were not as mature a year ago, the basic technologies used on this project are easily implemented by even Jr. developers with only 2 or 3 years of software development experience. In fact, it takes more effort to organize and promote an effective marketing campaign than for me to complete implementation of DarkLabyrinths from prototype to production.
What it IS
Currently, DarkLabyrinths exists as a prototype application and is conservatively valued at $1-million dollars for the entire lobby area with approximately 500 walls available for sale. However, estimates (not as conservative) predict that the combined DarkLabyrinths properties value could easily exceed $1-Billion dollars within as little as six months to 1-years time (including all revenue streams). This offers a big advantage to first-movers, providing them with an opportunity to experience an excellent rate of return that is hard to beat, especially in this type of a crowd-funded project.
This is not only a great project to fund, but literally an opportunity to make a profit from your contribution reward or perk! At the end of the project, property holders will be able to trade and sell properties, transferring ownership for a marginal fee (usually paid by buyer). This puts first-movers in control of valuable virtual-estate that is nearly guaranteed to grow in value over the life of the project, even past the funding stages. Even 10x10 image owners (see rewards) will see significant gains when bigger players decide they want to buy up all 10x10 images and consolidate into a full face when there are no longer any faces available.
Virtual Property Base
Regardless of any other factor, the domain name is a useful measure of the value of any online offering. I have registered DarkLabyrinths with .com, .net, .org and .info TLDs. Currently, I have registered the domains for 1 year, but upon successful funding of the project, I will ensure that all domains are registered for a minimum of 10 years, and ideally 20 years if we meet all stretch goals on funding.
Also noteworthy is the association between Galileo's quote (above) and WebGL / GPU processing as a modern, digital manifestation of the geometry which Galileo so revered. The DarkLabyrinths represents this antithesis to this idea: that modern society can not only appreciate the beauty of geometry, but also capitalize on that appreciation in driving evolution on the Internet--all while wandering through the DarkLabyrinths. Cool ironic twist, at least I think so :)
What's in it for you?
Forget the t-shirts and coffee mugs, DarkLabyrinths rewards and perks present an opportunity for you to claim your own digital virtual-estate and actually capitalize financially on your contribution of support. It's easy to see that if this project goes viral, everyone involved stands to benefit tremendously, even down the line. By acting early, you stand to benefit most as rewards are structured to highly favor first-movers.
General Timeline
Kickstarter campaign: May 13 through July 13, 2013
From my research, I anticipate a full-time job managing and promoting the kickstarter project. Therefore, I do not anticipate being able to do much toward development other than high-level planning, most of which is already completed. Also, during this phase, I will also be working with lawyers to ensure that the organization is properly registered, as well as to reach out to community leaders to elicit support and develop strategies for handling bounties and control of DarkLabyrinths online assets (e.g. domain names, applications, etc). The purpose of all my documentation is to hopefully provide answers up front, as well as to empower evangelists to easily share the message.
- Legal / Setup: July 14 -- July 30, 2013
After the project funds, I need a couple of weeks to make sure all the legal and tax issues are properly addressed and that funds are properly escrowed and all necessary fees paid. During this phase, I will also be preparing to ramp up development by finalizing any design documents.
- Production Development: August 1 -- October 31, 2013:
At this point, development should proceed very smoothly. The focus will be on developing a production version of the product, as well as to release frequent updates on development status. The goal is to provide transparency to backers so they see how progress is going, or to be able to receive updates if there are any unforeseen setbacks or roadblocks. Three months of development should provide ample time for good development.
- Go Live (beta): November 1, 2013
At this point, users should be able to access the production beta, which will be live at www.darklabyrinths.com. Rewards will be claimed at this point, online, where backers will be able to log-in and update their wall image, as well as to set any hover text and links. Visitors to DarkLabyrinths will be able to wander the labyrinth alone, or in small groups online and see the images backers have posted on walls.
Buy / Sell / Trade functionality by January, 2014
This is where users that have extra properties will be able to ‘cash in’ by selling and then transferring property ownership. Also, any leftover blocks not originally claimed by backer rewards or perks will be auctioned by the community at this point.
- Community development begins in 2014
Going forward, adequate funds will be escrowed to support DarkLabyrinths online presence for 10--20 years depending on funding. So expect that continued improvements will be ongoing with DarkLabyrinths. But at this point, the project will be ‘complete’ and released to production, allowing us to focus on community building. Community bounties will be drawn up and circulated within the Open Source groups and moneys will be made available for forums development, documentation and other necessary funding to support THREE.js and related technologies. It is also during this period that the community will come together and decide how revenues and bounties will be controlled to mutual benefit of all involved.
Supporting Documents and Live Demo
Billion-Dollar DarkLabyrinths Whitepaper link
Financial / rewards spreadsheet link
Supporing documents folder on Google Drive
Live Demo link * the live demo is running on app-engine with limited quota. if you try the demo and it does not load the images (assuming you have WebGL compatible GPU and browser), then the server may be out of bandwidth quota for the day. Please try again later. (old demo: todo::update to new prototype when implemented)
Acknowlegements
Absolutely none of this would be possible without the tremendous Three.js, WebGL framework! A shout out to Mr. Doob, alterdq, bhouston and zz85 for contributing to such a wonderful project.
Also, thanks to Paul Lewis, whose Arrowtwist site has been a life-saver when trying to figure out how to get up and running with Three.js.
It would also be a disservice not to mention Daren Acosta, whose April 2012 online WebGL demo/game served as inspiration, and great starting point on this project, although I did have to hack quite a bit to get what I needed in the current prototype.
There are many more I could mention who have helped with documentation, given online examples or have helped with questions on stackoverflow.com or irc (bai, root66, merpnderp and others).
Thank You
Please keep in mind that your generous support not only helps fund an amazing application and technology suite, but directly benefits every other member who also claimed property in the DarkLabyrinths. By extension, every friend you refer benefits the project, the entire Kickstarter community, yourself and even the friend you referred. So help get the word out on this incredible opportunity. Working together, we can make amazing things happen, but it all depends on your support. So I sincerely thank you, not just for myself or 'my' project, but for all those who have already shown support as well and all those who will benefit from DarkLabyrinths realization.
Risks and challenges
Browser Compatibility:
Currently, WebGL is not supported equally among all browser. Anyone with a computer more than 2 years old likely will not be able to run the site. In early April Microsoft leaked information that they would be supporting WebGL in IE 11, so this should help to improve support industry-wide. There is limited support on some Mobile Phones as well, but not all iOS and Android. But there are really 'two' audiences. The first, Kickstarter backers, are more likely to not have compatible browsers than the target 'Virtual Tourist' audience, which are younger and have more powerful 'gaming' equipment. Therefore, this is more a risk during the Kickstarter 'promotional' period. Also, timing is critical and there is a good chance that IE 11 will release just in time for this project to reach production, which will serve to increase virtual tourist adoption.
Funding Requirement too Low:
The $250,000 funding requirement will easily meet all projected costs for development and maintenance, but such a lackluster show of support may not herald a successful viral campaign. Nevertheless, the $250,000 is the minimum required to successfully pull of the project without hitch, and everything above that goal serves to heighten awareness and feed the media frenzy. Nevertheless, the ideal would be to raise in excess of $500,000, which would be the total if all rewards were claimed in Kickstarter.
Funding Timeline too Long:
I know even Kickstarter advises that projects should be 30-days or less as this increases the sense of urgency. My feelings, however, are that this would miss an excellent opportunity for great media coverage. Assume instead that the project were getting pretty close to funding within 30 days, then this would give an additional 30 days to attract as much media attention as possible for the project, as well as to rally developer community support. By the end of the 60-days, momentum would then be established and the Kickstarter project can 'end'. We can use project update milestones as a means to 'update' the press and keep the media coverage fresh from the development through post-release phases. Indeed, a significant amount of the money raised will be used to promote the site for the benefit of backer-property-owners (see financials).
Performance Issues:
Currently, on a decent computer with a decent GPU, the prototype site runs between 25--35 FPS (sometimes bursting up to 42 FPS). However, a minimal number of textures are applied, and other functionality is not yet enabled. With thousands of images (and sprite-sheets), performance will become an increasing concern as the project evolves. Several strategies exist to offset these performance issues such as: merging geometries, cross-domain resource loading, asynchronous / delayed / dynamic loading by labyrinth position, caching images as base64 encoded strings in localstorage, along with metadata, only loading interactive image-maps when user interacts/clicks on wall (image displays otherwise), and other strategies. Performance will (always) be challenge in projects of this nature, but I am confident there is nothing that is a showstopper. Additionally, performance will be less of a concern going into the future to come as bandwidth, processing, gpu and webgl support will only continue to increase over time. Regardless, this risk is offset by building in and escrowing adequate hosting fees. As detailed in the financial documents section of the whitepaper, there will be adequate bandwidth and data storage available for the duration of the project (minimum 10 to 20 years, depending on stretch goals funding).
Managing rewards:
I only bring this up in consideration as this risk is easily mitigated by planning ahead. You'll note that rewards have face-call order. Therefore, based upon the data provided by Kickstarter on contribution rewards, we'll import that data and send emails with a URL that allows contributors to claim their rewards online, as well as to upload all necessary information right at the site. Because this is a digital product, there is no hassle with delivery or shipment to cause problems. Nevertheless, I do anticipate some problems with lost URLs, wrong email or contact information, etc. However, my hope is that contributors provide accurate information and respond quickly to notifications from DarkLabyrinths (make sure to add to email whitelist).
