10 ms·
Rooms.xyz
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoIs what?
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago[flagged]
- yieldcrv 3y ago[flagged]
- somethoughts 3y agoInteresting set of tutorials: https://medium.com/@btco_code/programming-in-rooms-xyz-part-1-cb498b2b4301 https://medium.com/@btco_code/programming-in-rooms-xyz-part-... https://medium.com/@btco_code/programming-in-rooms-xyz-part-2-5cb955d43c93 https://medium.com/@btco_code/programming-in-rooms-xyz-part-... https://medium.com/@btco_code/programming-in-rooms-xyz-part-3-f15146cdaa5d https://medium.com/@btco_code/programming-in-rooms-xyz-part-... Here's the Lua API documentation - pretty extensive! https://rooms.xyz/docs https://rooms.xyz/docs I'm surprised they don't list these off the landing page. I'm unclear about the business model too - seems like it could be an interesting option for learning coding after Scratch, Python Turtle, etc. Interestingly I noticed they got some seed funding from A16Z but as far as I know Scratch is supported via philanthropy which A16Z is not. Pretty cool - hopefully they go the edtech route versus NFT/Roblox heavy on the monetization route! Edit: Found their Youtube channel which explains a bit more about the goals and has some video tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWbWmXoRHm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWbWmXoRHm0 Also the requisite TC launch article: https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/16/a16z-backed-rooms-xyz-lets-you-build-interactive-3d-rooms-and-simple-games-in-your-browser/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/16/a16z-backed-rooms-xyz-lets... Good timing on the launch - just in time for kids getting off for summer break!
- leovander 3y agoReminds me of Solana Portals. https://theportal.to/ https://theportal.to/
- sMarsIntruder 3y agoWhat’s the business model behind this? I’m genuinely curious.
- iamwil 3y agoThis was the first thing on my mind also. It had too much polish to seem like it was just some curiosity of the internet done for its own sake. Maybe it is?
- cinntaile 3y agoThe company behind this is called Things.inc and they're a VC backed startup. https://twitter.com/ThingsByThings https://twitter.com/ThingsByThings
- iamwil 3y agoOh. I guess I can see the pitch. Something like people make their own animal crossing islands, and cozy games are a thing now, so people would want a space of their own.
- derefr 3y agoNot sure, but it's backed by a16z: https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/16/a16z-backed-rooms-xyz-lets-you-build-interactive-3d-rooms-and-simple-games-in-your-browser/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/16/a16z-backed-rooms-xyz-lets...
- spaceman_2020 3y agoSince its backed by A16z and has a bunch of .eth accounts tweeting about it, I would assume something related to NFTs. If NFTs and crypto can make experiments like this sustainable, then I'm all for it.
- pavlov 3y agoDoes someone still tweet with a .eth username? That’s like writing about Beanie Babies on your MySpace. The fad is gone, no matter how hard you try.
- noduerme 3y agohuh? is this something people do?
- derefr 3y agoIf you've seen what people try to do with their houses in Animal Crossing: yes, they do.
- joshvm 3y agoThey certainly did - Habbo Hotel was something of a phenomenon in the early 2000s (and amazingly still exists?)
- doublerabbit 3y agoI still have my habbo from 2002. Exists but dead.
- snickmy 3y agoNice, creative, job. not for me, but a lot of work been done here. Wish you all the best
- Biganon 3y agoLovely. It reminds me of a website I used to go to in the early 2000, when I was a kid. It was called L'Escale, ans as a member you had your very own room on a pirate ship, and you could choose your pet from three possibilities, a monkey, a parrot and a cat iirc. It was extremely simple but back then it was amazing to me. Later I was a member of a 3D universe (created in 1998, mind you), a French speaking "fork" (not really but it's complicated) of ActiveWorlds. It was called Le Village 3D, and as a (paying) member, you had your own lot in the village, a perfectly square area that was yours and on which only you could build (typically a house but not necessarily). I can totally see the appeal of having your own little cosy space. This is not what it is apparently, but it made me think of it. Here you can create as many rooms as you want, and that's why it's not as beautiful as what I was experiencing back then. It is scarcity I'm missing. Creating an account was complicated. Losing your account was a catastrophe. I cherished what I had.
- dopidopHN 3y agoI remember using the village 3D for a while. Nice little community. I was 14 or 15 so I never used the pay plan but Stayed on the « tourist » plan. With a goofy skin and no « property » to build on. It was still a cool, little clunky thing.
- prakhar897 3y agoWell polished, but this is literally "Habbo Hotel". There were a number of issues which lead to Habbo's downfall: 1. Anarcho Capitalism: Habbo Hotel turned into a pure monopoly when children learnt about capitalism on field. This video explains this in detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE6jxjKPNZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE6jxjKPNZQ 2. Politically Incorrect Stuff: Lots of non conforming stuff happened. some of which actually made it to mainstream news. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp2EZbbuMa0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp2EZbbuMa0 3. Scams: Kids are the easiest demography to scam. It also teaches them at an early age how to scam people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiDPTiFHfcs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiDPTiFHfcs Although right now this product is a bit different than Habbo, but how do the founders plan to address these? Especially the political one since anyone can make anything right now. Edit: Sorry I edited the comment after realizing its Habbo.
- tetris11 3y agoI was thinking the same. Maybe if there was multiplayer, it could be a hangout space? But hangout and do what. Teens mostly game online together, so the rooms could be a portal for accessing some kind of shared resource (private music or video colection, logins to other sites). Or it could be turned into a game itself and a fun collab space to polish a game in-universe
- thih9 3y ago> Habbo (formerly Habbo Hotel) is an online community aimed at teens and young adults. (...) Founded in 2000, Habbo has expanded to nine online communities (or "hotels"), with users from more than 150 countries. Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habbo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habbo
- JSavageOne 3y agoDo you have any sources that aren't videos? Curious about this, but don't care enough to sit through 10 minute videos. In any case I don't see any issues with something being "politically incorrect", unless that's a euphemism for something else.
- 3y ago
- seydor 3y agotiny second life
- miyuru 3y agoLooks kinda like the Habbo game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habbo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habbo
- JSavageOne 3y agoCool concept but it doesn't seem to be multiplayer? That or the rooms I joined were empty.
- kator 3y agoThis reminds me of Metaplace[0][1] back in 2007 created by a MMO veteran Raph Koster. Not sure how they will avoid the same issues that killed Metaplace and other attempts at this over the years. [0] https://www.raphkoster.com/2021/09/02/online-world-or-metaverse/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaplace
- rgbrgb 3y agoInteresting comparison. What killed metaplace?
- neom 3y agoMade by these guys: https://things.inc/ https://things.inc/ Seems cool: https://rooms.xyz/alex/crossy https://rooms.xyz/alex/crossy
- chaosprint 3y agolove the concept. maybe it's just me, but the experience is quite uncomfortable(dizzy) for me when I use the arrow key to move and find the character moving in a rotated direction
- mihird9 3y agoAs someone else commented above, it is surprisingly similar to https://bondee.com https://bondee.com. Almost a rip-off.
- MattRix 3y agoRooms seems like a very different style of product (not built around the social/chatting stuff). Also those kind of isometric hexagon rooms have been around for ever in loads of different places.
- mihird9 3y agoThe TechCrunch article mentions that they downsized (i.e. fired all non-founder employees) to just the three co-founders, before launch. That seems kinda shady to me.
- caturopath 3y ago> The startup — Things Inc. — was founded in 2021, raising $8 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and $2 million from various angel investors, including Adobe’s Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky and Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, among others. After burning funds too quickly at first, the team downsized their 10-person team to just the three founders in order to maintain enough runway. Now, Rooms.xyz has somewhere around four-plus years, Toff says. https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/16/a16z-backed-rooms-xyz-lets-you-build-interactive-3d-rooms-and-simple-games-in-your-browser/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/16/a16z-backed-rooms-xyz-lets...
- morgante 3y agoThat still seems kind of odd. At 10 person team, assuming ~$250k annual cost per employee, should have a runway of 4 years. Something else must have happened (ex. dramatic pivot; profligate spending early on) to necessitate layoffs right now.
- mihird9 3y agoI mean, how does a company hire 7 employees based on the funding/money they've raised, and then layoff every single one of those 7 hired employees in a span of about 1 year? With such planning/decision making, and no business model in place, how do VCs even fund them in the first place?
- yunohn 3y ago> 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. Before that, he spent a couple of years at Vine as product manager, including after it was acquired by Twitter. 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. I don’t think the founders are particularly good at making their employers money either. They kept jumping between experimental projects that went nowhere.
- Wowfunhappy 3y agoI quite enjoyed playing this one: https://rooms.xyz/thaivo/cats https://rooms.xyz/thaivo/cats
- duckqlz 3y agoReally interesting concept. The most intriguing part is the ability to add LLM functionality directly in your code. From the documentation: ``` local PRIMER = "You are a sushi chef in a sushi restaurant. " .. "You are kind and cheerful and excited about offering " .. "different kinds of sushi to the customer." function onClick() aiCharacter(PRIMER) end ``` This opens up a world of possibilities for a casual game developer and there are many other interesting features. I would love to read more about how they are controlling cost on their api searches with the LLM. I look forward to seeing more from rooms.xyz. [1] - https://rooms.xyz/docs#aiCharacter https://rooms.xyz/docs#aiCharacter
- jshaqaw 3y agoThe code insertion part is interesting. I could see it being the hook to finally get my 12/13 year old daughters to play with code a bit.
- yevvy 3y agoThis is very cool! Well done guys!
- knodi 3y agoits hard to trust any .xyz domain spams have been going ham on these cheap domains.
- Wendelena 3y agowill there be an api to create room? feels like that could power a lot of developers
- issafram 3y agoI was recruited to a company maybe 6 years ago which did something similar to this site. For the life of me I couldn't understand what the business model was. Thankfully I didn't accept their offer and I haven't heard of them since.
- echelon 3y agoRooms.xyz is going to pitch - metaverse - creator marketplace and consumer flywheel - environment for learning agents, "we'll be first to AGI", "there's no better way to deploy a learning agent than a game" (so many game AI companies are doing this) Then they'll raise $20M from a16z or someone. I'm only being half sarcastic here, because I do see a way in which they could execute on that plan and build value. But it's also humorous to poke a little fun, because there is so much irony in the world around us right now. Platforms like VRChat and Roblox are no joke though. It'll be hard for these folks to match that level of success, but I wish them luck nonetheless. Edit: nailed it. They raised $10M, and I knew it would be a fit for a16z.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rsp1984 3y ago> Edit: nailed it. They raised $10M, and I knew it would be a fit for a16z. Source?
- celestialcheese 3y agohttps://techcrunch.com/2023/05/16/a16z-backed-rooms-xyz-lets-you-build-interactive-3d-rooms-and-simple-games-in-your-browser/#:~:text=The%20startup%2C%20backed%20by%20%2410,other%20interactive%20activities%20contained%20in https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/16/a16z-backed-rooms-xyz-lets...
- mk_stjames 3y agoI'm a materials scientist and mechanical/aerospace engineer, and I've worked on projects and have colleagues still working on things like developing better sustainable urban transport systems, new recycling plant technologies, EV battery and powertrain research involving lower cost composite materials that use less energy to have less cradle-to-grave environmental impacts for various industries. Projects where people really want to build things to change things for the better, real physical things. And they struggle like hell to even get funding for the engineers/scientist salaries let alone money to keep the lights on in the labs or shops.... And I see this story, and these guys get 10 million dollars to make... some pixel art things that run in a browser and do... something, whatever... $10M. I think I might go jump off a bridge.
- atleastoptimal 3y agoWhile it may be somewhat early as a concept, THIS is the kind of thing I imagined the future of the internet would be like back in the mid 2000s, i.e. the stuff that would be possible and more common extrapolating from playing Runescape in 2006.
- what-no-tests 3y agoJust like Habbo Hotel [0] from > 20 years ago. [0] https://www.habbo.com/ https://www.habbo.com/
- leowbattle 3y agoI met some of the people from this company at Nordic Game Jam 2023 - lovely people
- gmerc 3y agobaiting nintendo lawyers right on the splash page. bold.
- pfedak 3y agoCan be a fun linktree alternative at the very least. Spent way too long making https://rooms.xyz/pzf/noclip https://rooms.xyz/pzf/noclip, the physics engine they expose has some unfortunate limitations but there's enough to have fun with.
- OdysseyMark 3y agoA great way to learn design
- T3RMINATED 3y ago[dead]
- stevenicr 3y agoWent to three pages, did ctrl+f export If there is a way to export the data to be used in other things I would jump into this a bit.. Anything similar out there to make things that work with the matrix chat 3d like things?
- Arathorn 3y agoby “matrix chat 3d like things” do you mean https://thirdroom.io https://thirdroom.io? It would be super easy to build something like this on Third Room - and then get e2ee and decentralisation etc for free :)
- stevenicr 3y agoYes! I am trying to recall what was mentioned that can make assets for this. It software / web app that work with "glTF Models"? More than that? I did 5 minutes of digging and not sure.. is it unity level of software? I had some things bookmarked I wanted to make stuff with a while back.. was it Daze3d? I'd love to see a list of things that can work with this / export to this (matrix usable 3d).
- Arathorn 3y agoUnity can make glTF for it (as can Blender or anything else that exports glTF). The unity pipeline is: https://github.com/matrix-org/thirdroom-unity-exporter https://github.com/matrix-org/thirdroom-unity-exporter