Cozy game, interior decorating app, coding primer, or something in between, the interactive, 3D space builder known as Rooms he’s got has arrived in the App Store. The startup, which earlier raised $10 million in seed funding led by a16z, offers a way to design 3D spaces — its “rooms” — that are filled with furniture, decor, pets and tiny figurines. You can turn these rooms into mini-games if you prefer.
The purpose of Rooms is simply to create and explore design, which is something many people find relaxing. However, this “digital equivalent of LEGOs,” as the company has described it, also has an educational aspect.
The project, which first hit the web earlier this year, was inspired by co-founder Jason Toff’s work in Google’s AR/VR division, including the now-closed VR and AR app creation service Poly and its 3D modeling tool for VR, Blocks. Its co-founder Bruno Oliveira he also worked with him at Google, where he was a co-founder by Nick Kruge Background includes time on Smule, Uber and Google’s YouTube.
The idea with Rooms is to offer open-ended play where people use their designs as a form of self-expression. But you don’t just have to interact with the objects visually — you can also click to reveal the code to further customize the elements using Lua, the coding language also used in Roblox. This helped introduce coding concepts to newer users. In fact, Toff tells TechCrunch, many schools have chosen Rooms as a way to introduce kids to coding, as an alternative to something like code.org.
Other users just enjoy decorating their 3D spaces for fun.
“[Rooms users] you want to decorate a room for the calming effects of simply placing things and processing it. There’s this whole movement I’ve been learning about… cozy toys,” Toff explains. Casual games are those that people play without an end goal, they are just for relaxation and relaxation. “People make rooms to make rooms.”
To that end, there are quite a few rooms that are tributes to Taylor Swift or those built by K-pop fans, for example. Some people interconnect their rooms and a few turn them into tiny, interactive toys. Some people spend a lot of time in their rooms, designing spaces that look almost professionally designed that could serve as templates for real-world interior designs.
Image Credits: Rooms
With its iOS app, out today, Rooms offers a vertically scrolling TikTok-style stream where you can view the different rooms created by the community. There are several feeds to choose from, including a “For You” feed — which will later be algorithmic but currently more curated — as well as an Editor’s Picks feed and a recent feed. As you scroll through the feed, you can like and share favorite rooms, or you can switch to camera mode to take a snapshot of the room — which then notifies the creator. This image can then be added to your own room as decoration.
Image Credits: Rooms
You can also design your rooms from scratch using the more than 6,000 objects in the Rooms catalog, up from 1,000 when it launched on the web. The company first launched its community with 1,000 Voxel 3D objects commissioned by creators, which can be customized to your space.
Other people’s rooms can also be mixed in — that is, used as a template for your own designs. (Attribution to the original creator automatically follows when you remix, Toff notes.)
Image Credits: Rooms
As you decorate your space, you can enter an editing mode where you can adjust anything — like the size, shape, color, glow, opacity, pattern, and behavior of objects. You can even add in an object, such as placing a photo of your cat on the TV screen or a painting. Or you can use an OpenAI tool to create an image that appears on the object.
The new iOS app works on both iPhone and iPad, but Toff says the iPhone is better for browsing than creating.
“It works even better on the iPad. You can encode, but I wouldn’t recommend encoding on the iPhone because it’s just like a tiny screen. There is not enough space,” he notes.
Image Credits: Rooms
Since the beta launch of Rooms on the web, the company has signed up more than 40,000 users who have since created over 50,000 rooms. Its daily active users are also in the thousands.
In the future, Rooms may turn to artificial intelligence to help design rooms, but the company is treading carefully here. After the AI creation feature was added to the product, some community members were not happy.
“Weirdly… there was an interesting pushback,” says Toff. “I don’t know if it’s the audience or the age or what, but more than I expected, they were put off by the existence of AI…but I think, practically speaking, it would be easier to make rooms and it would be silly not to use AI to help you create rooms,” he adds. The timeframe for adding AI, however, is still unknown. For now, the company is focusing on launching its mobile app and growing its user base.
Toff says the app is really more of a beta and will continue to iterate on the experience over time, based on user feedback.
“We want to learn from and with users. We put it out a little earlier than it was perfect,” he admits.
The iOS app for rooms is available now on the App Store.
