Five months ago, Rooms, a 3D design platform created by former Google employees, launched its beta version on the App Store. Today, we're getting a big update to our free iOS app, adding new discovery-first features like an activity feed, an explore page, and the ability to browse by category.
Rooms is an interior decoration app that falls under the category of cozy games. Players can build and code complex 3D rooms and mini-games using a library of over 7,500 digital items. Users can customize items by editing code in Lua, a programming language also used in Roblox Studio.
Rooms touts that the number of registered users has reached 250,000, up from 40,000 in 2023. The increase in users is a notable accomplishment for his team of three-man, fastidious company that launched its web platform less than a year ago.
“When we launched last November, it was in some ways an experiment to see if this idea we had resonated with people,” co-founder Jason Toff told TechCrunch. Told. “I was pleasantly surprised by how much people not only used it, but also made a lot of room out of it. [and] The room was much better than I expected. ”
Toff previously worked in Google's AR/VR division. The founding team includes his former colleague Bruno Oliveira, as well as Nick Kluge, who previously worked at Uber, YouTube, and Smule.
Image credit: Things Inc. (Rooms parent company)
At launch, the mobile app only had three TikTok-style vertical feeds to choose from: the “For You” feed, the Editor's Picks, and the Recent feed. But as Rooms continues to grow, the founders want to give users an easy way to discover other user-created rooms and admire the designs of their creators.
With today's release of Rooms 2.0, the company has added a trending feed to your home screen to help power popular creators and most-liked posts. Additionally, users can scroll through more than a dozen new categories, including “Games,” “Art,” “Fantasy,” “Nature,” and “Weird.” There's also Tribute, a collection of rooms inspired by popular IPs like Minecraft, The Legend of Zelda, and Hello Kitty. The feed was previously curated, but we now have an algorithm that controls the order of rooms that appear in the feed.
There's also a new Explore page with even more ways to discover, including exploring user profiles, top games, and all-time favorites.
Additionally, the app introduces “Honeycomb View,” a hexagonal grid that provides a new way to view multiple rooms at once. Users can tap on different rooms to zoom in or out to see fewer or more designs.
“Our lack of discovery became a stumbling block…Everyone wants their work to be seen. We also heard favorite testimonials from creators [discovering] Other people's rooms… I think it would be very helpful to have dozens of new surfaces instead of just one [feeds] It’s about making sure your content gets discovered,” Toff said.
Rooms new[アクティビティ]The tab allows creators to track likes and comments, as well as when their rooms are “remixed” or posted. At the bottom of each room there is an icon that shows the total number of remixes.
The Remix feature, which allows you to use someone's design as a template, has also been updated to detect copycat rooms. This prevents creators from copying someone else's design, which they spent hours creating. (According to the company, one in eight of its users spends more than two hours of their time editing a room.)
Under the hood, the team implemented mesh optimization techniques (which minimize the complexity of 3D objects) to speed up rendering of large rooms by up to 20 times.
Most of the updates are on the iOS app, but Rooms has added new categories and improved speed to the web version.
In the future, Rooms is looking at AI-powered tools to make it easier to code in the app. The feature “looks at your code and tells you where there are obvious mistakes,” Toff said.
As TechCrunch previously reported, the company was considering generative AI features to help with room design, such as the ability to generate images of a room's walls and floor. Toff said they are not actively working on that feature because of the high cost. However, in the future, Rooms may offer a premium subscription service, but the company is said to be waiting until the app gains more attention.
Rooms plans to release a desktop app on Steam in the coming months. The company is also considering his Android app, but it hasn't made it a top priority.