6/15/2023 0 Comments Play lego digital designerWhile the rooms themselves are interactive and can be interconnected with one another, there’s not much more that can be done with them after the design is complete besides share their URL with others to show them off. That could help to introduce younger users to coding concepts before moving on to Roblox’s more advanced editing tools. ![]() Rooms uses Lua, the same language that’s used for coding in Roblox. There’s an educational aspect to the software, too, as you don’t only have to interact with the objects via the user interface - you can also click to reveal the code. Every room is also by default public and can be “remixed” - that is, used as a template or jumping-off point for designing your own. The startup seeded its community with 1,000 Voxel 3D objects it commissioned from creators, which can be added and customized in your own space. ![]() Like a box of LEGOS, Rooms is meant for open-ended play where people use the objects to express themselves in some way - whether that’s building a tiny version of a real-world room, a dream room or by creating some sort of interactive space, like a simple game or a musical instrument you can click to play, or something else. It can be expensive and you can lose parts, for example, Toff noted. But LEGO has limitations due to its physical, printed plastic nature. “The thought was, LEGO is one of these few things that kids love, adults love and adults want their kids to play with,” he says. “Basically, I set out for the company to make the digital equivalent of LEGO,” Toff explains. Meanwhile, third co-founder and iOS engineer Nick Kruge hails from Smule (where he was director of Product Design) and Uber, in addition to Google, where he worked on YouTube mobile and YouTube Music. Rooms’ co-founder Bruno Oliveira also worked on these projects at Google, which is how the two met. The project also takes inspiration from other projects Toff worked on at Google’s AR/VR division, like its VR and AR app-building service Poly (which became another Google causality in 2020), and the 3D modeling tool for VR, Blocks. Instead, in Rooms, you can search for, edit and then add a fully formed object to your space - like a door, a sofa, a table, a bed, a car, decor, a pet or anything else you can dream up. This prompted the idea of something of a middle ground for 3D design, where the process would be nearly as straightforward as it was in Minecraft, but the building unit wasn’t a single block. Around the same time, Toff’s six-year-old son had just started playing with Minecraft, where designing with 3D models was easy, but it had to be done one block at a time. As it turned out, however, the process was actually fairly complicated and involved the use of complex software. And most recently, Toff worked at Meta, where he dabbled with new product experiments, like the zine maker E.gg and music-making app Collab, among other things.Īfter leaving his last position, Toff decided to take some time off, which he decided to fill by trying to learn how to make 3D models - something he always thought sounded like fun. Before that, he spent a couple of years at Vine as product manager, including after it was acquired by Twitter. ![]() Prior to Rooms, Toff spent 10 years at Google, off and on, in product marketing and product management, including at YouTube, Area 120 and in VR/AR. The idea for Rooms was inspired by a combination of factors, explains co-founder Jason Toff - namely, that 3D model creation today was far too difficult.
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