Rooms.XYZ is a Kind of Mini-Metaverse You Can Customize & Explore in the Palm of Your Hand

Rooms.xyz is a new virtual world platform to play with; still in Beta, it's a deceptively simple (that is, actually powerful) interactive room creator/explorer on the web and iOS:

Watch the intro demo above. I only started noodling with it myself, but I see it as a kind of potential mini-metaverse, where the virtual world is represented by thousands of interconnected rooms you can play with in the palm of your hand. The charming voxel graphics and the bite-sized experiences that are 2.5D by default (with an option to display in full 3D) are a tight, organic fit with how Gen Y/Z habitually engage on the Internet.

Founded by Jason Toff, formerly of Vine, Twitter, and Meta (where he was a VR developer), here's a good interview with him in FastCo:

He still doesn’t know why, but a vision of an isometric room popped into his head, and it just felt right. Rather than design small objects or entire worlds, building a room “felt like a Goldilocks middle ground,” Toff says.

After all, people already love building spaces in games like The Sims or Animal Crossing. But creation games like Dreams can get so big and complicated they become overwhelming. Toff also liked the idea of doors serving as metaphorical hyperlinks. Much like websites link to other websites, he imagined rooms linking users to other rooms—his vision for an internet in 3D, though he’s reasonably hesitant to call it a “metaverse.”

After Toff decided on this new direction, his team spent nine months working on an online room builder (and the following three months after that working on the iOS app).

With no technical knowledge, you can drag thousands of premade objects into position and tap on them to get a full customization panel. If you want a ball to bounce in place, you can select that option in a drop-down. But if you can code, then you can actually program exactly what you want to happen. (Cleverly, Rooms uses the same programming language as the megahit game platform Roblox). If you prefer to build something yourself, no problem, you can import images and textures right into your room, plus there’s a voxel editor (voxels are just 3D pixels) for building any object you like, block by block.