Originally published on 28 September 2024
In March 2024, Ryan, Pedro, and I entered the Colosseum Renaissance Hackathon, the latest iteration of the semi-annual Solana online global hackathon.
Over the course of a month, we refined our proposal for MeshMap and our first game idea, City Champ.
City Champ was a mixed reality first-person combat and tower defense game developed for Meta Quest 2/3/Pro.
Players would scan real world locations using phone LiDAR and then add them as playable maps in-game.
I also included an experimental outdoor mixed reality game mode.
Our goal for City Champ—in addition to making urban XR as fun as possible—was to promote MeshMap’s open 3D world map. With City Champ (and other games and experiences like it) we could make building the map fun and rewarding.
By integrating with MeshMap for scanning, games and creator platforms could function as a loosely connected network of mappers and developers facilitating an explosion of XR content and sharing the benefits.
Furthermore, companies and governments could use the scans in urban planning, transportation, construction, disaster prevention and response, and other cases where spatial data is valuable.
Over 8,300 participants from 95 countries submitted over 1,000 projects in the hackathon.
In late April, Colosseum announced that our submission, MeshMap + City Champ, had won 1st prize in the Gaming Track, sponsored by Phantom.
The prize came with $30,000 and the confidence that MeshMap has high potential.
Then, in early May, Colosseum gave us the golden ticket to join the first ever cohort of their new Accelerator program.
The acceptance came with an additional $250,000 and was our confirmation to establish MeshMap Labs, Inc.
In June, we started working full-time on MeshMap.
The Colosseum Accelerator program introduced us to an exclusive founder community, 1:1 mentorship, and eight weekly educational sessions as we honed our mission.
During this time, we started experimenting with the Magic Leap 2 for building outdoor AR games.
In addition to using pre-scanned maps in VR, we could now scan in real-time to play anywhere.
Here's a short clip of me playtesting the game on Magic Leap 2 at Zojo-ji Temple in Tokyo, Japan.
I continued making updates to City Champ while we explored different methods for scanning large, accurate maps.
In September, we came to Singapore for the annual Solana Breakpoint conference.
I spent most of the week in Colosseum's in-person hackathon arena, tweaking our code and playtesting with anyone who came up to talk.
I was there for so long that I ended up in Solana's official video recap.
Meanwhile, developers all around me were working on their projects for the next hackathon, Radar.
To me, the best part of hackathons, accelerators, and communities like Solana is the camaraderie among fellow builders as we all try to create something meaningful.
I'm glad we decided to build MeshMap on Solana and I look forward to integrating the community more in the future.
Coming out of the summer, we've built up some momentum and raised a seed round.
We plan to spend the upcoming months researching and iterating on how to best map for XR and build large location-based AR experiences.
Thank you to Colosseum and our other investors for believing in MeshMap.
