Rooms is launching on iOS as a free mobile app today on a worldwide basis. It lets you create your own 3D rooms and simple games in a browser.
The app lets you create, share and discover rooms that use interactive 3D animation.
Rooms comes from a team of ex-Googlers. The startup was backed by $10 million in seed funding led by A16z earlier this year.
To create a room, you can just use drag-and-drop, editable objects or code. That leads to creative play. It’s kind of like Minecraft, Roblox and Lego. Jason Toff, who spent 10 years at Google. He took time off and loved to learn how to make 3D animated models.
The app, available for free on both iPhone and iPad, comes from the two-year old startup, Things. Rooms lets you explore thousands of user-generated virtual rooms, or make your own. The app offers over 5,000 free “things”– 3D objects with special qualities like lighting, interactivity, etc.– that you can add to your room. Editing is done with voxels— aka 3D pixels— which will be familiar to anyone who has played Minecraft.
The three-person Googler team behind the company was inspired by creative apps they encountered when they were kids, like Kidpix and Geocities. Toff, the CEO, is a father of three and wants to build software that is delicious and nutritious for his kids to grow up with— sort of like digital lego. The platform has been live, in beta, for six months on desktop web only.