Edorble

» see edorble.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

You and your students appeared as avatars on a small campus, talked over voice chat, watched a video together on a surface in the room, broke into smaller groups, and raised a hand with a gesture when you wanted to speak. That was Edorble, a 3D world for holding a class in, built in Unity and running on desktop as well as in VR headsets. The public beta opened on 2 December 2015.

Two people made it. Gabriel Baker was a humanities teacher who went back for a master's in education technology and came out of it convinced that virtual worlds were the missing piece of online teaching. Cederik Haverbeke was the developer, a Belgian who handled the networked multiplayer and the C# underneath. The company was registered in Santa Barbara, California.

The pitch reads strangely now because it is almost word for word the pitch a hundred funded companies made in 2021. Meet in a 3D space, and put a browser on the wall of it. Edorble was making that argument in 2016, to a market of university instructors who mostly wanted a working webcam, and it did it with two people and no real money.

~ the chronicle ~

~ about five years early ~

September 2017 was the high point and it was also the end. Edorble was accepted into the EdTech vertical of the Kickstart Accelerator in Lausanne, and Baker and Haverbeke presented there on 20 September. The company's own blog posted for the last time three days before that, on 17 September 2017.

After that the site simply sat. The homepage served the same 8,517 bytes month after month through 2018 and 2019, the way an abandoned Webflow site does. The host was still answering a redirect on 14 February 2020. By 4 October 2020 the domain was returning a 404, and the first Edorble was over.

Nobody announced anything. A two-person company does not hold a press call to say it stopped.

~ the distance ~

I was in my early thirties when Edorble opened, working as an engineer in Ankara, and I have never been a teacher. The category it lived in, ed-tech sold to institutions, is one of the few corners of the consumer-adjacent internet I have no contact with at all. What I do recognize is the shape of the company: two people, a Unity build, a good idea aimed several years ahead of the market that would eventually pay for it.

~ the second edorble ~

The domain came back on 29 May 2022, with a new title: "Edorble: The Open Source Framework for learning in XR". The product had been reborn as a codebase rather than a service. That version was last edited on 10 June 2022, twelve days after it appeared.

It then sat unchanged for two more years. The last successful capture is 28 May 2024, the host started returning 403s on 19 June 2024, and by 26 August 2024 it was 404 again. The domain is registered through 2027 and currently resolves to nothing at all. The Webflow subdomain the site was built on, edorble.webflow.io, answers 404 on every path. Search engines still index blog posts from it that no longer load.

~ what came after ~

Gabe Baker went to Virbela, where he ran FRAME, a browser-based tool for building and meeting in 3D spaces. Same argument, with someone else paying for the servers this time. The idea Edorble could not fund in 2017 was worth a great deal of money four years later, to people who had never heard of Edorble.

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