Five months ago, Rooms, a 3D design platform created by former Google employees, unveiled its beta version on the App Store. Today, the free iOS app is receiving a significant update with new discovery-oriented features, including an activity feed, explore page, category browsing, and more.
Rooms is an interior decorating app categorized as a cozy game. Players can construct and program detailed 3D rooms and mini-games using a library of over 7,500 digital items. Users can customize items by modifying code with Lua, the programming language also utilized in Roblox Studio.
Rooms boasts a quarter of a million registered users, a significant jump from 40,000 in 2023. This user surge is a remarkable achievement for a small three-person team that launched its web platform less than a year ago.
Co-founder Jason Toff, previously from Google’s AR/VR division, along with fellow co-founder Bruno Oliveira and team member Nick Kruge, who has experience at Uber, YouTube, and Smule, are leading the development.
Image Credits: Things Inc. (Rooms’ parent company)
Initially, the mobile app featured three TikTok-style vertical feeds: a “For You” feed, Editor’s Picks, and Recent feed. As Rooms grows, the founders aim to enhance user discovery of user-generated rooms and acknowledge creators for their designs.
With the introduction of “Rooms 2.0,” a Trending feed and new categories like “Games,” “Art,” “Fantasy,” and others have been added to the home screen. Additionally, the Explore page offers more ways to discover, such as profiles, top games, and all-time favorites.
The new Activity tab enables creators to monitor likes, comments, remixes, and posts of their rooms. The feature also detects copycat rooms to deter imitation of intricate designs and implemented mesh optimization to speed up rendering large rooms.
While most updates are on the iOS app, new categories and speed enhancements are being incorporated into the web version of Rooms.
In the future, Rooms plans to introduce an AI-powered tool to simplify coding on the app and explore generative AI for room design. However, a premium subscription and desktop app on Steam are also on the horizon.
Rooms will soon launch a desktop app on Steam and may consider an Android app in the future, though it is not currently a top priority.
