VR Edmonton

I see this thread has been bumped so let me talk a bit about what progress I've made myself since I have been doing more investigation into this. I'm a little nervous because I believe I may have found his phone number (with Oceanview's help,) but I don't want to draw attention to it (even though it's publicly available information) so I'm just going to say if you find his number, I already plan on calling it, please don't call it yourself.

Alright, let me run down everything I've tried so far.

First I should mention I've of course looked at the site in Wayback Machine. Unfortunately it is missing the actual most necessary part which is the QuickTime movies, all that remains is the Flash menu, which is supposed to have music which is also gone. I remember what the music sounds like, I even mocked it up in FL Studio (not perfectly of course.) It was probably a stock music loop.

So the guy who made VR Edmonton is Andrej Orzelski (also goes by Andy Orzelski.) Searching for his real name brings up that he got an award for creating VR Edmonton. Searching up his alias brings up not much more info. He used to work at a web design company called Sundial. The company still exists here in Edmonton. I tried calling them. When I asked about Mr. Orzelski, they told me I have the wrong number, so they must not have recognized his name.

He has a Facebook page which was almost never used. From it we can learn he worked at ETS as recently as 2013 (which is the transit system here, meaning he was likely a bus driver.) The biggest clue was on Wikipedia, where he posted an image of his dog as the example image of a German Shepard. The collar with the phone number is clearly visible and says "City of Edmonton." I hated the idea of just calling him directly. But I was out of options, so I tried it. The phone number was for an ETS support line. I asked the lady on the phone about Mr. Orzelski. She informed me that he was not in their company directory. If he did really work at ETS - he doesn't anymore. And the crazy thing is, he was here, in my city. But I have almost no information about him.

He also has an old LinkedIn which doesn't reveal anything I don't already know.

Andy created VR Edmonton through a company he owned called VR2C Studio. As far as I know he was the only member of this company. Here is the VR2C website (requires Flash, so it won't load on mobile.) The About/Q and A pages are unfortunately missing all text.

The site was curiously up until 2011. Its current owner is a different unrelated VR company using that name. From the About page, we can see a photo of Andy himself. The first capture of the site in December 2004 has this image, so it must've been taken before then. He looks 30 or 40 in this photo, so he's probably in his 50's or 60's now. That gives us an approximate idea of his age. Given I haven't been able to reach him at all, I don't know if he's even alive anymore, as dark as that possibility is, but it's entirely possible he just has all his social media set to private.



Someone on the Flashpoint server found an old address he used to live at. I know he's not there anymore because I sent a letter to him in the mail. It got returned as the recipient was unknown. The phone number now belongs to someone else also.

My last remaining hope is that on the VR Edmonton homepage in Wayback it mentions you could buy a CD-ROM version for $30. That means it must've existed on physical media. This seems incredibly rare as it's never shown up on eBay or anything similar. I mean, it's a CD-ROM of freely available content on a niche website only really interesting to Edmonton citizens. But I tried taking the approach of seeing if I could find any friends of Andy's. Maybe one of his colleagues had bought his CD.

From the award PDF above, I noticed that Mr. Orzelski bought some stock images for VR Edmonton from a company called Macri Photography in the nearby city of Sherwood Park. Andy also liked their Facebook page. I thought maybe Andy knew the staff personally, so I reached out to Mr. Macri. He didn't know who Andy was. Andy is also friends on Facebook with someone named Daniel Marchewka, who is currently running for mayor in a city in Poland. I reached out to him via email in case they knew each other, but never got a response. Finally, I noticed on what remains of VR Edmonton in Wayback Machine that it had a forum with six registered users. One of these users used their real name, Phil Anderson. I figured since the forum had so few users maybe they were people Andy personally roped into signing up. I found a website belonging to a Phil Anderson in Edmonton, and reached out to him. He did get back to me, but did not know what I was talking about.

I do have one remaining tidbit of information. But I don't know what to do with it. Andy also made a VR CD-ROM for the college I went to, NAIT, according to the old VR2C site. This makes me think that at some point, he was a NAIT student. Probably circa 2001 - 2002. But I don't think anything would come of asking around my professors if they knew him. What would I learn? And it's only a hunch, I don't know what course he would've taken or even if he really was there, just that he made a VR experience for them one time. Possibly, as a Capstone project.

A final word of caution, there are a lot of startup companies here in Edmonton that are doing stuff with VR nowadays - VR referring to the newer type of VR, VR headsets, and not the more 90's definition of "anything that can be explored on a computer is VR." So if you search for "VR Edmonton," expect to bring up a lot of unrelated results. And looking through the Digital Dream Machine site, it seems entirely unrelated and just coincidence.