Day: July 9, 2018

Edorble: A Brief Introduction

Edorble is a virtual world platform for education, based on Unity, and currently in beta. From their website:

Edorble is a cross-platform application for Mac, PC, HTC Vive, and Oculus Rift that lets you gather in 3D environments with your peers or colleagues. These environments let you use in-world web browsers, break into small groups, use gestures, and explore. You can either use our pre-made environments, or you or your students can use the Edorble Creator Tools for Unity 3D to design your own 3D environments (see next question).

Beyond Edorble, We also create custom 3D/VR applications for clients in the education/training space, and we offer in-person and online courses and professional development at Edorble Academy.

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While Edorble is in beta, it’s entirely free so long as you are using it on a small scale (20 or fewer simultaneous users in your world). When we leave beta, we’ll have an affordable, monthly subscription model that gives you access to larger-scale usage, premium features for the creator tools, and more. If you want us to design a custom build of Edorble with specific designs, features, or integrations, we also do that as a service.

Here’s a year-old, one-minute video that gives an overview of what Edorble looks like (unfortunately, there’s no sound):

I couldn’t find any recent videos about Edorble, which leads me to wonder if the project has stalled. I also note that the Edorble blog hasn’t been updated since September 2017. It looks like it’s a project that never made it out of beta.

Decentraland and the Greater Fool Theory

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Image by Couleur on Pixabay

As I have written about several times before on this blog, I am extremely skeptical about the overheated land market in Decentraland. I believe it’s a financial bubble that is going to hurt a lot of investors when it pops.

Last week I read a CNBC article about Jordan Belfort, the famous “Wolf of Wall Street”, who is warning investors to get out of Bitcoin if they don’t want to lose all their money:

“[Bitcoin] is all based on the Greater Fool Theory,” Belfort says in a recent YouTube video. “I know this better than anyone in the world. I’m not proud of that, but I do.”

Belfort says bitcoin’s price surges are thanks only to a belief by buyers that there will continue to be ‘greater fools’ who they can sell the asset to at a higher price.

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“There’s no fundamental value [with Bitcoin], it’s all based on the next guy and the next guy,” he says. “Get out if you don’t want to lose all of your money because … there’s a very good chance it’s going to crack. And when it really cracks, you’re not going to be able to sell on the way down, there will be no liquidity.”

I remembered what Belfort said when I came across a blog this evening called Decentraland Blogger, by a guy called Matty786 who describes himself as follows:

I got interested in the project back in January when I had no idea virtual land ownership was even a thing. I was just searching different blockchain projects and stumbled open Decentraland. A crypto blockchain project inspired by novels such as Ready Player One and Snow Crash.

After a bit of researching I was hooked and decided to jump right in buying my first couple of properties for around $500 USD each.

Now, 6 months later, I’ve bought and sold 100’s of properties and made close to $100,000 USD doing it!

And now Matty wants to share his knowledge with the world! For the low, low price of only 1 Ethereum coin (US$485/CDN$686), this guy will teach you everything he knows about flipping virtual land for profit in Decentraland:

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Witness the Greater Fool Theory in action!

Rumii: A Brief Introduction

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Rumii is a social VR app intended for business and educational use. A January 2018 UploadVR profile on Rumii notes:

With over 500 companies signed up in Early Access after launching last year, rumii is a social VR app with a difference. Instead of meeting up with friends to share videos, hang out and play games, the app is designed as a professional tool for work meetings and education spaces. Aiming to replace video conferencing, users adopt virtual avatars and then communicate over voice chat while sharing materials over a range of features like desktop sharing, 3D model loading and web browsing.

Among its features, Rumii offers a 3D model loader, a whiteboard, screen sharing, and file sharing. Rumii offers free and paid plan pricing. It is available on Steam.

VRChat Is Still the Most Popular of the Newer Virtual Worlds

Steam has published a list of the games on its platform which have the highest number of simultaneous users, and VRChat has made the list for having over 15,000 simultaneous players:

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Of course, VRChat reached an all-time peak of 20,000 users in January 2018, before falling back down to around 6,000 users lately. It’s still the most popular of the newer VR-compatible virtual world platforms, though, followed by Rec Room (Steam statistics).