five months ago, Roomsa 3D design platform created by ex-Googlers has released its beta version on App Store. Today, the free iOS app is getting a big update that will bring a wave of first-of-its-kind new features like an activity feed, an explore page, the ability to browse by category, and more.
Rooms is an interior decoration app that falls under the category of cozy games. Players can create and code complex 3D rooms and mini-games using a library of over 7,500 digital assets. Users can customize elements by editing code with Lua, the programming language also used in Roblox Studio.
Rooms has a quarter of a million registered users, up from 40,000 in 2023. The user growth is a remarkable achievement for a scrappy three-person team that launched its web platform less than a year ago.
“When we started last November, it was kind of an experiment to see if this idea we had would resonate with people,” co-founder Jason Toff told TechCrunch. “We were pleasantly surprised that people not only used it, but also made rooms a lot, [and] much better rooms than we expected.”
Toff previously worked in Google’s AR/VR division. His former colleague Bruno Oliveira is also on the founding team as well Nick Krugewho has experience working at Uber, YouTube and Smule.
Image Credits: Things Inc. (parent company of Rooms)
At launch, the mobile app only had three vertical TikTok-style streams to choose from: a “For You” stream, Publisher’s Picks, and a recent stream. However, as Rooms continues to grow, the founders want to give its users a way to easily discover other user-created rooms and praise creators for their designs.
With the release of “Rooms 2.0” today, the company added a Trending feed to the home screen, helping to amplify popular creators and their contributions with the most popular. Additionally, users can scroll through more than a dozen new categories, including Games, Art, Fantasy, Nature, and Weird. There’s also “Tribute,” a selection of rooms inspired by popular IPs like Minecraft, The Legend of Zelda, Hello Kitty, and more. The streams were previously curated, but now algorithms have been added that control the order of rooms that appear in the streams.
There’s also a new Explore page with even more ways to discover, like exploring user profiles, top games, and all-time favorites.
In addition, the app introduces “Honeycomb View”, a hexagonal grid that provides a new way to browse multiple rooms at once. Users can tap on different rooms and zoom in or out to see fewer or more designs.
“Our lack of discovery has become a hindrance… Everyone wants their work to be seen. We’ve also heard from creators that they like it [discovering] other people’s rooms… I think it will help a lot to have not just one surface, but dozens of new ones [feeds] to discover content,” Toff said.
The new Rooms Activity tab allows creators to track likes and comments, as well as when their room is “mixed” or posted. Each room has an icon at the bottom to indicate the total number of remixes.
The Remix feature, which allows users to use someone’s design as a template, has also been updated to detect copy rooms, which hopefully prevents creators from imitating someone’s design that took hours to make. (According to the company, 1 in 8 users have spent more than two hours editing their rooms.)
Under the hood, the team implemented a mesh optimization method (which minimizes the complexity of 3D objects) to make large rooms render up to 20 times faster.
Most of the updates are to the iOS app, but Rooms is adding the new categories and speed improvements to the web version.
In the future, Rooms is considering an AI-powered tool to facilitate in-app coding. The feature would “examine your code and tell you where there are obvious mistakes,” Toff shared.
As TechCrunch previously reported, the company has been exploring an AI capability to help design rooms, including the ability to create images for a room’s walls and floors. Toff said they are not actively working on this feature due to the high cost. However, in the future, Rooms may offer a premium subscription offer, but the company is waiting until the app gains more traction.
Rooms will release a desktop app on Steam in a few months. The company is also considering an Android app, but isn’t making it a top priority.
