Private Beta of Edorble Available for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive

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Edorble is a 3D world for online classes, meetings, trainings, or webinars. It's a beautiful, private virtual world platform with synced web browser screens, support for hundreds of simultaneous users, voice chat, gestures, and more. It's been available for PC and Mac, but we're happy to announce that a private beta of Edorble is now available for the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive. You can sign up to get an invite here. If you're already an Edorble Pioneer using our PC/Mac build and you want to try the VR version, just shoot me an email at gabe@edorble.com and I'll send you the download link.

Building Edorble for virtual reality headsets has always been on our roadmap, and we've published some thoughts about VR and education here, here, and here. Edorble is a natural fit for VR. We try to foster a sense of immersion, togetherness, and shared space for our users, and VR is the most immersive medium available. We think the sense of togetherness and community that 3D/VR tools promotes is one of the keys that will help unlock the potential and promise of online learning. The teacher-student relationship and the peer-to-peer relationship is something often lost in online education or training programs. The ability for a student to walk to the front of the room and give a presentation is impossible with video chat. Breaking into small groups during synchronous interactions is a logistical nightmare with traditional collaboration tools. We encourage you to give all of these things a try in the new VR build of Edorble.

Watch videos and display web content on the large, beautiful screens in Edorble. Teleport around to avoid motion sickness. Explore. Report bugs you run into. :) We know that typing in VR can be a hassle, so we provide a web dashboard that lets you save web content to the screens in your world in advance. That way your websites will be waiting for you when you get in your world, and you don't need to input the URLs in VR. You can save close to 35 URLs that will be displayed throughout your virtual environment. These can be websites, Dropbox files, videos, etc.

We hear a lot of talk about "content tools" vs. "creation tools", but it's important to remember: people themselves are content just as much as they are creators. Our main goal is to put people front and center and help them communicate, collaborate, explore, look at content together, and enjoy each other's company, expertise, challenges, questions, and answers.

You're not limited to our environment either. If you'd like to bring your own 3D models or assets into Edorble, and you have them as .obj or .fbx files, reach out to us about bringing them into or using them as your Edorble environment.

If you've got a VR headset and want to check out our environment, sign up to get an invite to our private VR beta here.

If you're an institution or company and you want a collaborative virtual world with custom designs, features, or integrations, we're here to help. Shoot me an email at gabe@edorble.com

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