Interactive 3D space builder
Known as a cozy game, an interior decoration app, an introduction to learning to code, or something in between. Now available on the App Store.
The startup, which previously raised $10 million in seed funding led by a16z, offers a way to design 3D spaces, or “rooms,” filled with furniture, decorations, pets, and tiny avatars. You can turn those rooms into mini-games if you want. Rooms is all about creating and exploring designs that help people relax. But as the company describes it, this “digital version of Lego” also has an educational aspect.
The project, which first launched on the web earlier this year, was co-founded by Jason Toff, co-founder of Google’s AR/VR division, which includes the now-shuttered VR and AR app-building service Poly and the 3D modeling tool Blocks for VR. Inspired by the work of his co-founder Bruno Oliveira. While co-founder Nick Kluge’s background includes time at Smule, Uber, and Google’s YouTube.
The idea of Rooms is to provide free play, where people use their designs as a form of self-expression. But in addition to interacting with objects in a visual format, you can also click to view the code and further customize items using Lua, the coding language also used in Roblox. This helped introduce coding concepts to young users.
I want to decorate a room that has a calming effect just by placing things there and editing them. What I learned is this whole movement… cozy game,” Toph explains.
In the iOS app released today, Rooms offers a TikTok-style vertical scrolling feed where you can check out different rooms created by the community. There are multiple feeds to choose from, including the “For You” feed (which will be algorithmic in the future, but is currently more curated), the Editor’s Picks feed, and the Recent feed.
As you decorate your space, you can enter an edit mode where you can customize everything from item size, shape, color, shine, opacity, pattern, behavior, and more.
Since the beta version of Rooms was launched on the web, the company has signed up over 40,000 users and created over 50,000 rooms since then. He also has thousands of daily active users.
“Surprisingly…there was some interesting backlash,” Toph says. “I don’t know if it was the audience’s fault, age, or something else, but there were more people than I expected who felt against the existence of AI…However, in reality, the room design is more It should be easier and I think it would be foolish not to use AI to help create the room,” he added.
For now, the company is focused on launching its mobile app and expanding its user base. Toff says the app is actually in beta and they will continue to iterate the experience over time based on user feedback. “We want to learn from and with our users. We brought it out a little earlier than it was perfect,” he admits.
Source: techcrunch.com
