Cozy game, interior decorating app, learn-to-code primer or something in between, the interactive, 3D spaces builder known as Rooms has made its way to 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, décor, pets and tiny avatars. You can turn those rooms into mini-games, if you prefer.
The purpose of Rooms is merely to create and explore design, which is something many people find relaxing. However this “digital equivalent of LEGO,” as the company has described it, also has an educational aspect to it.
First launched on the web earlier this year, the project was inspired by co-founder Jason Toff’s work in Google’s AR/VR division, including its now-shuttered VR and AR app-building service Poly and the 3D modeling tool for VR, Blocks. His co-founder Bruno Oliveira also worked with him at Google, while co-founder Nick Kruge’s background includes time at 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 only have to interact with the objects in a visual format — you also can click to reveal the code to further customize the items using Lua, the coding language also used in Roblox. That has helped introduce coding concepts to younger users. In fact, Toff tells TechCrunch, a number of schools have been picking up Rooms as a means of introducing kids to coding, as an alternative to something like code.org.
Other users simply enjoy decorating their 3D spaces for fun.
“[Rooms users] want to decorate a room for the calming effects of just placing things and editing it. There’s this whole movement that I’ve learned about… cozy games,” Toff explains. Cozy games are those that people play without an end goal, they’re just for relaxing and unwinding. “People are making the rooms for the sake of making the rooms.”
To that end, there are quite a few rooms that are Taylor Swift tributes or those built by K-pop fans, for example. Some people interconnect their rooms and a few turn them into tiny, interactive games. Some people spend a lot of time on their rooms, designing what almost appear to be professionally thought-out spaces that could serve as templates for real-world interior designs.