A cozy game, an interior decorating app, an introductory book for learning programming or anything in between, the interactive 3D space creation tool known as Rooms he have It made its way to the App Store. The startup, which earlier raised $10 million in seed funding led by a16z, provides a way to design 3D spaces — their “rooms” — filled with furniture, decor, pets, and little avatars. You can turn those rooms into mini-games, if you prefer.
The purpose of the rooms is just to create and explore the design, which many people find relaxing. However, this “digital equivalent of LEGO,” as the company describes it, also has an educational aspect.
First launched on the web earlier this year, the project was inspired by co-founder Jason Tuve’s work at Google’s AR/VR division, including its AR and VR app building service Poly and its 3D modeling tool for VR Blocks. His co-founder Bruno Oliveira I also worked with him at Google, when he was one of its founders Nick Krug Background includes time at Smule, Umber, and Google’s YouTube.
The idea of the rooms is to provide an open play where people use their designs as a form of self-expression. But not only do you have to interact with objects in a visual format, you can also tap to reveal the code to further customize times using Lua, the coding language also used in Roblox. This helped introduce programming concepts to younger users. In fact, Toff tells TechCrunch, a number of schools have chosen the rooms as a way to introduce kids to coding, as an alternative to something like code.org.
Other users simply enjoy decorating their 3D spaces for fun.
“[Rooms users] You want to decorate a room to get the calming effects just by placing and releasing objects. “There’s this whole movement that I learned about…relaxed gaming,” Tove explains. Relaxing games are those that people play with no end goal, just to relax and unwind. “People make rooms for the sake of making rooms.”
To that end, there are quite a few rooms paid tribute to Taylor Swift or built by K-pop fans, for example. Some people connect their rooms together and others turn them into little interactive games. Some people spend a lot of time in their rooms, designing what almost appear to be professionally thought-out spaces that can serve as models for real-world interiors.
With the iOS app launching today, Rooms offers a TikTok-style vertically scrolling feed where you can check out different rooms the community has created. There are several feeds to choose from, including the For You feed — which will later become algorithmic but is currently more structured — as well as the Editor’s Picks feed and the Recent feed. As you scroll through the feed, you can like and share favorite rooms, or you can enter camera mode to take a snapshot of the room — which then alerts the creator. That image can then be added to your own room as decoration.
You can also design your rooms from scratch using more than 6,000 items in the room catalog, compared to 1,000 when it launched on the web. The company first provided its community with 1,000 Voxel 3D objects commissioned by creators, which can be customized in your space.
Other people’s rooms can also be remixed, i.e. used as a template for your own designs. (Attribution to the original creator follows automatically when remixing, notes Tove.)
As you decorate your space, you can enter edit mode where you can customize anything – such as the size, shape, color, glow, opacity, pattern and behavior of the elements. You can also add media to an object, such as placing a photo of your cat on the TV screen or a painting, for example. Or you can use a tool powered by OpenAI to create an image that is displayed 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 better on the iPad. You can program, but I don’t recommend programming on the iPhone because it’s just like a small screen. There’s not enough space,” he says.
Since launching the beta version of Rooms on the web, the company has registered more than 40,000 users who have since created more than 50,000 rooms. The number of daily active users ranges into the thousands as well.
In the future, rooms may look to AI to help with room design, but the company is moving cautiously here. After adding the generative AI feature to the product, some community members were not happy.
“Surprisingly… there is an interesting resistance,” Tove says. “I don’t know if it’s the audience or age or what, but more than I expected, I was shocked by the presence of AI… But I think, in practical terms, it should be easier to create rooms and it would be silly not to use them,” he adds. Artificial intelligence to help you create rooms. However, the time frame for adding AI is still unknown. Currently, the company is focusing on launching its mobile app and growing its user base.
Tove says the app is actually a beta and will continue to iterate the experience over time, based on user feedback.
“We want to learn from and with users. We set it a little earlier than it was perfect,” he admits.
iOS app available for rooms Now on the App Store.