Five months back, Rooms, a 3D design platform created by former Google employees, introduced its beta version on the App Store. Today, the free iOS application is receiving a significant update with new features focused on enhancing user experience, such as an activity feed, an explore page, category browsing, and more.
Rooms is an interior decorating app classified as a cozy game. Users can design and program detailed 3D rooms and mini-games utilizing a library of over 7,500 digital items. They can personalize items by modifying code with Lua, the programming language also used in Roblox Studio.
Rooms now boasts a quarter-million registered users, a substantial increase from 40,000 in 2023. This growth is a noteworthy achievement for a small three-person team that launched its web platform less than a year ago.
Co-founder Jason Toff, a former member of Google’s AR/VR division, shared, “When we debuted last November, it was somewhat of an experiment to gauge the reception of our idea. We were pleasantly surprised by the fact that not only did people use it, but they also created rooms extensively, surpassing our expectations.”
Toff’s former colleague, Bruno Oliveira, is also part of the founding team, along with Nick Kruge, who has prior experience working at Uber, YouTube, and Smule.
Image Credits: Things Inc. (Rooms’ parent company)
Initially, the mobile app offered only three TikTok-style vertical feeds: a “For You” feed, Editor’s Picks, and Recent feed. However, as Rooms grows, the founders aim to enable users to easily discover other user-created rooms and appreciate creators for their designs.
With the launch of “Rooms 2.0” today, the company introduced a Trending feed on the home screen to promote popular creators and their most-liked creations. Users can now explore more than a dozen new categories like “Games,” “Art,” “Fantasy,” “Nature,” and “Weird.” Additionally, there’s a “Tribute” section featuring rooms inspired by popular IPs such as Minecraft, The Legend of Zelda, Hello Kitty, among others. The content was previously curated, but now algorithms determine the order of rooms displayed in the feeds.
An Explore page has been added with additional ways to discover content, including exploring user profiles, top games, and all-time favorites.
Furthermore, the app introduces “Honeycomb View,” a hexagonal grid that facilitates browsing through multiple rooms simultaneously. Users can tap on different rooms, zoom in, or zoom out to view more or fewer designs.
Toff mentioned, “Our lack of discovery was limiting… Everyone desires recognition for their work. Creators also expressed enjoyment in exploring other people’s rooms… Having multiple new [feeds] for content discovery will be immensely beneficial.”
The new Activity tab allows creators to monitor likes, comments, and when their rooms are “remixed” or shared. Each room now features an icon indicating the total number of remixes.
The Remix function, allowing users to utilize someone’s design as a template, has been updated to identify copycat rooms, aiming to prevent creators from replicating a design that took hours to create. (As per the company, 1 in 8 users spent over two hours editing their rooms.)
Internally, the team implemented a mesh optimization technique (that reduces the complexity of 3D objects) to enhance rendering speed, making large rooms render up to 20 times faster.
Most of the enhancements are geared towards the iOS app, with Rooms also incorporating the new categories and speed enhancements into its web version.
In the future, Rooms is contemplating an AI-driven tool to simplify coding within the app. This feature would identify obvious errors in the code, as Toff mentioned.
As previously reported by TechCrunch, the company was exploring a generative AI feature to aid in room design, like creating images for room walls and floors. Toff noted that they are not actively pursuing this feature due to high costs. However, Rooms may introduce a premium subscription in the future, waiting for the app to gain more traction.
Rooms plans to release a desktop app on Steam in a few months. While considering an Android app, it is not currently a top priority for the company.
