Rooms.xyz | Hacker News Reader

Rooms.xyz

rooms.xyz

480 pointsprawn106 comments

Really 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

I 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.

Rooms.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.

> Edit: nailed it. They raised $10M, and I knew it would be a fit for a16z.

Source?

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/16/a16z-backed-rooms-xyz-lets...

I'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.

I understand how you feel. I tried to help academics commercialize inventions for a while.

Investment isn’t based on technical merit or impact, it’s based on ROI. They might overlap sometimes but they are not the same thing.

> it’s based on ROI

I’m pretty sure rooms.xyz will not have significantly more ROI than green-tech hardware R&D.

The primary reason here is a16z idiocy.

"It's time to build" NFT Chat Rooms powered by Solana.

I could have included a citation, but in general Crunchbase has the details you need on most startups. It's a great go to.

Interesting set of tutorials:

https://medium.com/@btco_code/programming-in-rooms-xyz-part-...

Here's the Lua API documentation - pretty extensive!

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

Also the requisite TC launch article:

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!

Reminds me of Solana Portals. https://theportal.to/

Well 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

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

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

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.

I 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

> 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

Do 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.

If I were to wager a guess PI here means straight out nazi imagery.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pools-closed

That sounds innocuous.

and yet you're wrong...

Actually they aren't, even if that video doesn't reference it. Internet Historian did a piece on 4chan invading habbo hotel and forming swastikas out of people standing in a pattern and blocking doors so people couldn't leave, etc.

They were talking about the video.

You assume they're talking about the video, I think we're talking about the claim in general (which the video was just evidence of an example). It doesn't really matter which one of us is right, as I was just trying to add to the conversation with additional information.

> a character derived from a well-timed screenshot of a /b/blocker standing behind a bronze duck statue, and Swastiget, which refers to the group staging of a line formation in the shape of a swastika to anger the site's moderators.

Um, so about that....

Based on the first video at least, Habbo Hotel looks like it has almost nothing in common with rooms.xyz.

It's looks like a clone of https://bondee.com

> Habbo Hotel turned into a pure monopoly when children learnt about capitalism on field.

> Kids are the easiest demography to scam. It also teaches them at an early age how to scam people

Who teach values to the kids are the parents, not a website. Kids don't learn to scam or to be anarcho capitalists playing such games but instead observing their parents.

Well this is wrong. I learned the intricacies of CSS and HTML in 2006/2007 at the age of 12 by learning to create pixel perfect phishing pages for Habbo Hotel. (A fact I’m certainly not proud of but does make me a bit of a domain expert nonetheless.) My parents didn’t teach me that.

The learn this by observing other players.

Then people say: So then ban First person shooters, and then people argument: "Oh I play call of duty and don't shoot anyone in real life". So what? Do everyone get influenced by games or just those that - for instance - didn't have strong parents, teaching them things like values, empathy and etc?

> literally "Habbo Hotel"

Where is it written?

Looks like the key difference is that there are no corporate-generated unique/scarce items (that increase in value) as everybody is able to create everything themselves.

The video about anarcho capitalism on Habbo is mind blowing. Turns out to be one of the most effective demonstrations I've seen of what kind of hell an anarcho capitalist society would be.

I'm a bit confused by the video, because it mentions several times that the Habbo staff actually did impose restrictions (attempting to shut down casinos). So perhaps under-regulated capitalism is more accurate. Which is also similar to what we have in real life

Minors gambling, scam giveaways, predatory practices, classism, etc, happened even before Habbo imposed any restriction, hence anarcho capitalism.

After Habbo imposed some minor restriction on gambling (forced by the swedish state), players went from "official" casinos to underground casinos, using tricks to bypass said restrictions.

Right, this is not anarcho-capitalism though, this is just capitalism with an underground economy

No, it is anarcho capitalism as it comprised all the elements of capitalism without any "state" like hierarchy. As the video explains, Habbo dropped all of its moderators in favor of a slur censoring AI, so there was effectively no regulation in place except for slurs.

Restrictions on gambling only came later on, and that's when it possibly stopped being anarcho-capitalism.

Why address it? This is part of the fun of these online games. Ultima Online had similar issues, except you could straight up kill people.

What an absurd and loaded commentary. Doesn't any game that involves currency and some kind of economy 'turn players into capitalists'? And couching that as a bad thing implicitly...

Except for the superficial similarity of an orthographic 3D view, this seems nothing like Habbo Hotel.

Habbo hotel was multiplayer and had in-game chat. Rooms.xyz does not appear to be multiplayer in that way.

Habbo hotel had an in-game currency that you used to buy objects / furniture. Rooms.xyz has no in game currency (that I can tell).

Rooms.xyz allows you to edit objects, including adding programming code to make those objects interactive. Habbo hotel had no such interface.

Rooms and Habbo are nothing alike except for the similarity of art style. Habbo hotel is basically a glorified chat room, whereas Rooms seems like a Unity game engine for kids.

Of course, content moderation is a challenging issue for any tool that allows the creation and sharing of content, I agree with you there. But that’s not a challenge unique to Habbo Hotel!

IIRC they have VC funding so it's very likely in-game currency will show up.

Habbo hotel had "programmable logic" that facilitated the scams, gambling, and capitalism.

Habbo was not a "glorified chatroom", it was an MMO centered around an in-game currency and acquiring more of it.

> Rooms.xyz allows you to edit objects, including adding programming code to make those objects interactive. Habbo hotel had no such interface.

The the first link in GP, there apparently was programming in habbo, and when actual random number generators (dice) were limited in a effort to curtail gambling was used I lieu of dice but wasnt visible or verified as part of the game engine to actually be random in the specified way.

I think where those videos (at least the first one) miss the mark is where they assume the ones running the systems to scam kids are also kids. Some were, I'm sure (kids have to grow out of being sociopaths or having sociopathic behavior IMO, and it happens at different rates for different people), but usually what happens is that adults move in that do this stuff as a living and just run enough scams concurrently to make enough money

Any assumption that an ecosystem meant for children is entirely children when there is money to be extracted is very flawed.

Well, that was messed up. Thanks for sharing, I had never heard of habbo hotel until now.

This 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

Interesting comparison. What killed metaplace?

Looks kinda like the Habbo game

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habbo

As someone else commented above, it is surprisingly similar to https://bondee.com. Almost a rip-off.

Rooms 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.

Made by these guys: https://things.inc/

Seems cool: https://rooms.xyz/alex/crossy

love 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

The 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.

> 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...

That 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.

I 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?

> 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.

Why are people downvoting this? Smh

Eh, better to downsize than to run the company into the ground. I don't envy the decision, but I see why they made it.

Lovely. 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.

I 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.

Nice, creative, job. not for me, but a lot of work been done here. Wish you all the best

What’s the business model behind this?

I’m genuinely curious.

This 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?

The company behind this is called Things.inc and they're a VC backed startup. https://twitter.com/ThingsByThings

Oh. 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.

Not sure, but it's backed by a16z: https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/16/a16z-backed-rooms-xyz-lets...

Since 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.

Does 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.

It was always a little stupid because the .eth domain didn't really resolve to anything. All it did was give people a chance to see your crypto portfolio if you had any funds on that address.

If you think ENS is only about showing portfolio you do not understand ENS.

What else is it used for? I have an ENS domain and that's pretty much the use case I've seen so far.

If your ENS domain's use case is so obscure that most don't get it, then maybe you need to modify the use case.

ENS and beanie babyes are nothing a like, maybe research more.

This is pretty much the only use case for crypto I see being viable and useful moving forward. I think it's cute and fun and if people want to sink money into hobby stuff like this then nobody should tell them otherwise.

There has been a drastic degradation of crypto culture in the last couple of years. From speculation being the trojan horse that was supposed to lead to a decentralized future, it has devolved into speculation being the only use case.

The problem with monetizing anything with crypto in this environment means that people will only buy it for speculative purposes. Which means that instead of building anything sustainable, you just end up building trash and spending on marketing to keep the speculative hype train going.

It’s like running a publicly traded company, but with extremely fickle shareholders.

No it’s not like that. It’s like gambling.

Gambling has been an extraordinarily popular human pastime since we came down from the trees.

Literally nothing about the human response to crypto is interesting or novel.

I mean speculation IS just another type of gambling, yes.

No it's not. Speculation can be a bet on the outcome of an economic or other real world system that is not a zero sum game.

For example you might speculate on how likely it is that people will strike oil on a given patch of land by investing in that land and some drilling. If you're right and oil is discovered there is more wealth in the world as a result of this speculation.

Gambling is not like that. Gambling doesn't have any connection to productive activity, it's just people transferring money around with wealth going from some people to some other people. That's what crypto is.

I see what you’re describing as investing, whereas the speculation is the gambling part of it.

Nothing related to NFTs or crypto in the product or in the plans

I can't find information about their actual business model on the site. What could it be? The first thing Rooms.xyz makes me think of is Habbo (Hotel). The developer could sell extra features (through a subscription), premium items, and space to build in. A voxel editor and custom code make premium items a harder sell: you can replicate them if they aren't very complex and you don't care about the social status of using premium items. The primary premium commodity could instead be space: larger rooms and more rooms per account. They could also charge users for highlighting their rooms in a recommendation system, if they cultivate a community that hangs out on the site.

Edit: There is a line about it in https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/16/a16z-backed-rooms-xyz-lets...:

> Eventually, Rooms could monetize by selling objects for purchase, subscriptions or licensing its software for education, but that’s all very much to be determined at this point.

Jason from Rooms.xyz here! We haven't figured out the business model yet, but we figure if this catches on there's probably a way to responsibly make money :-)

Definitely an edtech CodeCombat-like platform route would be ideal coming from a parent (i.e. tutorials, elearning, online private tutoring at $200 per month). CodeCombat is great but definitely more oriented toward the traditional boy oriented programming. Your offering is much more approachable to both boys and girls and higher in graphics quality/aesthetic.

If you need to directly monetize - perhaps an itch.io/Appstore type e-store would be interesting where creators could monetize their cozy style game creations through a straightforward publishing them.

Hopefully if you do want/need to try some sort of Roblox/Fortnite style, monetized open-world version, you can separate it into its own domain (i.e. rooms-world.xyz) and keep rooms.xyz strictly for Scratch like learning experiences. The potential of rooms.xyz as it stands now is great as an edtech platform.

Perhaps some private donor (Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, etc.) could help to buy out the original rooms.xyz from your seed investors and put it into some sort of private foundation (i.e. Scratch Foundation [1], Khan Academy Foundation). You could then be explore growth/monetization IPO-able opportunities through a separate entity while keeping what you guys have already built in tact for the long term.

[1] https://codecombat.com/teachers/resources

[2] https://www.scratchfoundation.org

lmao

The 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.

Can be a fun linktree alternative at the very least. Spent way too long making https://rooms.xyz/pzf/noclip, the physics engine they expose has some unfortunate limitations but there's enough to have fun with.

Cool concept but it doesn't seem to be multiplayer? That or the rooms I joined were empty.

While 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.

Went 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?

by “matrix chat 3d like things” do you mean 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 :)

Yes! 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).

Unity 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

I quite enjoyed playing this one: https://rooms.xyz/thaivo/cats

Just like Habbo Hotel [0] from > 20 years ago.

[0] https://www.habbo.com/

I met some of the people from this company at Nordic Game Jam 2023 - lovely people

will there be an api to create room? feels like that could power a lot of developers

tiny second life

This is very cool! Well done guys!

huh? is this something people do?

If you've seen what people try to do with their houses in Animal Crossing: yes, they do.

They certainly did - Habbo Hotel was something of a phenomenon in the early 2000s (and amazingly still exists?)

I still have my habbo from 2002. Exists but dead.

its hard to trust any .xyz domain spams have been going ham on these cheap domains.

A great way to learn design

baiting nintendo lawyers right on the splash page. bold.

Is what?

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