Rooms
Rooms is a free platform for building and exploring user-generated 3D voxel spaces on desktop web and iOS. Drag and drop objects, script them in Lua, then publish, share and remix creations with a community.
What is Rooms?
Rooms is a creative platform where people build, explore and remix small 3D worlds. Each room is an isometric, voxel-styled scene that a user assembles object by object and then publishes at its own URL for anyone to visit. It is made by Things, Inc., an American studio founded in 2021, and it runs both in a desktop browser and as a free iOS and iPadOS app; the mobile build also installs on Apple Silicon Macs and on Vision Pro through compatibility, but there is no Android version.
Building starts without any code. You drop items from a Thing Library of more than 20,000 user-generated models, adjust lighting, colours, movement and animation, hide or swap walls, and save. A built-in block editor, the Thing Editor, lets you model your own objects, and voxel files made elsewhere can be dragged straight into a room. For anyone who wants interactivity, Rooms runs on Unity and exposes a documented custom Lua scripting API covering sound and music, particle effects, explosions, physics types, timers, message passing between objects and controller input, so a room can become a short game or a guided story rather than a static scene.
The social layer matters as much as the editor. Version 4.0, released on 5 August 2026, replaced the old infinite feed with a home screen built around a finite daily selection of thirty unseen rooms, a Following row, creator suggestions and trending picks. Creation now lives in a dedicated Create hub offering a blank room, a building challenge, a starter template or a remix, and short guided builds called Activities each have their own gallery.
One point deserves clarity in an AI directory: Rooms is not itself an AI creation tool. Its only artificial-intelligence component is an optional helper chatbot supplied by Zapier, Inc., loaded only once you open it and give consent, and described by the publisher as automated software rather than a human. Everything you build, you build yourself. The whole service is free, and has been since launch.
What it does
- Build a 3D room by dragging objects from a library of more than 20,000 user-generated models
- Explore and play rooms published by the community, served as a finite daily selection rather than an endless feed
- Remix someone else's room, with a visible history that credits the original authors
- Script interactive behaviour in Lua: sounds, particles, physics, timers, messages and controller input
- Model your own objects in the built-in block editor, or import .vox files made elsewhere
- Adjust lighting, colours, movement and animation, then capture virtual photos and videos in Camera Mode
- Publish publicly or unlisted, share a unique room URL, follow creators and join weekly building challenges
When to use Rooms / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Rooms is the right fit.
When to use Rooms
- Hobby creators who want to build 3D scenes and voxel dioramas without learning a professional modelling suite
- Cozy-game players looking for short, community-made interactive spaces and mini-games to explore
- Beginners learning to program, thanks to a documented Lua scripting API, written tutorials and an active Discord
- Teachers and youth-club organisers running creative or coding activities, on a product its publisher aims at ages 4 to 104
- Voxel artists who already work elsewhere and want to import their .vox models into an interactive, shareable scene
When not to use Rooms
- Businesses and professionals: the terms restrict use to internal, personal, non-commercial purposes only
- Android users: there is no Android app, and the publisher explicitly advises against mobile browsers
- Teams that need real-time co-editing, since two people cannot edit the same room simultaneously
- Anyone needing precision 3D or CAD output: the engine produces stylised 8-bit voxel scenes, not technical models
- Organisations under GDPR obligations looking for a data processing agreement, an Article 27 representative or a declared hosting jurisdiction
How to use Rooms
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- On desktop, open rooms.xyz and choose Create in the top menu; a blank room opens with a welcome window offering a tutorial or a guided tour
- Sign in from the button in the top right: Rooms uses an emailed sign-in link, a Google account or an Apple ID rather than a password
- Pick a username carefully, because it cannot be changed afterwards and appears in the URL of every room you create
- On iOS, install the app from the App Store, sign in from the profile icon, then tap the hexagonal plus icon to start a new room
- Choose a starting point: an empty room, a preset style, a community base, a starter template, a building challenge or a remix
- Open the Thing Library with the plus icon at the bottom left and drag objects into the scene
- Use the Room Inspector to adjust properties such as walls, lighting, colours, movement and animation
- Create or edit your own objects in the Thing Editor, or drag in a .vox file made in another voxel tool
- Add interactivity with the code editor and the Lua API, using the reference at rooms.xyz/docs and the video tutorials
- Save the room, switch between edit and preview with the top sliders, then publish it publicly or unlisted and share its unique URL
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Completely free, with no advertising and no in-app purchases
- Immediate to pick up without any code, yet genuinely deep for anyone who wants to script
- Very large community-built object library of more than 20,000 models
- Strong external recognition: an Apple Design Award in 2024, App of the Day in over 100 countries and a 4.9 rating from roughly 7,600 App Store reviews
- Excellent on-ramp for learning to program, with a documented API, tutorials and an active help community on Discord
- Version 4.0 deliberately replaced the infinite feed with a finite daily selection, a rare design choice against endless scrolling
- The privacy policy states that no session replay, screen recording or keystroke capture is used, and the Global Privacy Control signal is honoured
Cons
- Not an AI creation tool: the only AI component is an optional third-party help chatbot, with no documented generative AI in the building experience
- No Android app, and mobile browsers are not supported
- The terms restrict use to personal, non-commercial purposes
- Creations carry a perpetual, sublicensable and transferable licence to the publisher and a perpetual licence to every other user, both surviving account deletion
- No GDPR statement, no data processing agreement and no declared hosting jurisdiction
- No real-time co-editing, no external embedding, and renaming a room means losing its likes, views and comments
- The business model is openly unresolved and the terms reserve the right to start charging, while the web build still shows a beta warning
Pricing & Plans
Rooms is provided entirely free of charge. There is no paid tier, no subscription and no in-app purchase, so no lowest paid price point can be quoted. The Terms of Use state that the services are currently free while reserving the right to charge for some or all of them in future, with prior notice to users who are then using them.
- full access to browsing
- creating
- editing
- scripting
- remixing and publishing on both desktop web and iOS
- with no paid tier
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Rooms handles your data.
GDPR overview
There is no mention of the GDPR anywhere on the site. Searches across every collected page and its archived HTML, for "GDPR", "General Data Protection", "Article 27" and "European Economic Area", return nothing on rooms.xyz or on the publisher's own site. The privacy policy, effective 17 May 2026, rests entirely on US law: it sets out rights for residents of California under the CCPA and CPRA, and of Nevada, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Utah, Oregon, Texas and Montana, and applies COPPA by refusing data from children under 13. It honours the Global Privacy Control browser signal automatically and offers a per-category consent panel through the "Manage cookies" and "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" links. No data processing agreement, no EU Article 27 representative and no data protection officer are named.
Who owns the data?
Under the Terms of Use, effective 17 May 2026, anything you post or upload is a "User Creation" and Things, Inc. does not claim ownership of it. You do, however, grant Things a worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable licence to use, edit, modify, truncate, aggregate, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works from, display and otherwise fully exploit those creations, for the service itself, for the company's business and for promotion on third-party sites and feeds. You separately grant every other user a perpetual licence to access, use, modify, reproduce and redistribute your creations, which is what makes remixing work. Both licences survive the deletion of your account.
Reuse rights
Content made by other people is licensed to you for one purpose only: using the service. The terms grant each user a worldwide, non-exclusive, non-sublicensable and non-transferable licence, and expressly forbid use, reproduction, modification, distribution or storage of that content for any other purpose without prior written permission. Inside the platform, reuse is deliberately designed in: any published room can be remixed, and a visible remix history credits the original authors. Every room carries a unique URL that can be shared freely, although embedding a room in an external website is not supported. Files created elsewhere, such as .vox models, may be imported only if you hold the rights to them, objects submitted to the shared Thing Library pass through a review by the team, and crawling, scraping or copying a significant portion of the content is prohibited. All use must remain personal and non-commercial.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
No hosting jurisdiction is declared. Neither the privacy policy nor the terms nor any other page states where user data is stored, and there is no trust or security page. What the policy does disclose is a small set of named service providers: Google LLC for Google Analytics 4, PostHog Inc. for product analytics with session replay, autocapture and surveys disabled, and Zapier, Inc. for the optional AI helper chatbot. Beyond those names, recipients are described only by category, namely hosting, technology and communication providers, security and fraud prevention consultants, support vendors and analytics partners. The company is based in Pennsylvania, the designated DMCA agent shares that address, the terms are governed by New York law and disputes are arbitrated in New York City, so the operative jurisdiction is the United States. As a technical indication rather than a contractual commitment, the domain resolves to an IP address geolocated in the United States on Amazon's network. The policy also warns that personal data may pass to a third party in a merger, acquisition or bankruptcy.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Rooms.
- Every creation carries a perpetual, sublicensable and transferable licence to the publisher and a perpetual licence to every other user, and both outlive your account
- It is a social platform built on user-generated content, so what you or a child encounters depends on what other people publish
- The App Store rates the app 4+ while the terms require users to be at least 13, a gap parents should be aware of
- Screen time deserves attention: the 4.0 release explicitly dropped the infinite feed for a finite daily selection, which shows the publisher itself sees the risk
- Deletion is irreversible: neither a deleted room nor a deleted account can be recovered
- The optional help chatbot is a third-party service, its answers are automated and the publisher asks users not to enter sensitive personal information into it
- Free access is not guaranteed indefinitely, and the publisher openly states that it has not yet found a business model
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Very low. On the web there is nothing to install: any desktop browser with WebGL and hardware acceleration enabled will run Rooms. On mobile, the iOS app is a 267.7 MB download that requires iOS or iPadOS 16 or later. Accounts are created with an emailed sign-in link, a Google account or an Apple ID, so there is no password to manage. The one irreversible decision at setup is the username, which cannot be changed and appears in every room URL. Building is drag-and-drop; the Lua scripting API is optional and fully documented.
Deployment
Apps stores
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Rooms
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
Is Rooms really free?
Which devices and platforms does Rooms support?
Is there an Android version?
Do I need to know how to code?
How much AI is actually in Rooms?
Who owns the rooms and objects I create?
Can I use Rooms for professional or commercial work?
What is the minimum age?
Is Rooms GDPR compliant?
How do I get support or delete my account?
Should you pick Rooms?
Rooms is one of the most polished free creative tools of its kind, and the recognition behind it is real: an Apple Design Award in 2024, App of the Day in more than a hundred countries, and a 4.9 rating from roughly 7,600 App Store reviews. It works because it removes almost every barrier at once, with nothing to pay, nothing to install on the web and no code required, while still leaving a deep seam for anyone who wants to script rooms in Lua. For hobby builders, cozy-game players, art and technology teachers and students learning to program, it is an unusually generous playground.
Two caveats matter before shortlisting it. The first is the label: Rooms is not an AI creation tool. Its only AI component is an optional Zapier-powered help chatbot, and the building, remixing and scripting involve no documented generative AI. The second is the contract. Use is restricted to personal, non-commercial purposes, and every creation carries a perpetual, sublicensable and transferable licence to Things, Inc. plus a perpetual licence to every other user, both surviving account deletion.
The legal framing is entirely American. The privacy policy, effective 17 May 2026, addresses US state privacy laws and COPPA, honours the Global Privacy Control signal and names Google, PostHog and Zapier as service providers, but never mentions the GDPR, publishes no data processing agreement and declares no hosting jurisdiction. Retention is described only in principle, with no stated durations, and deletions cannot be reversed.
Finally, the economics are openly unresolved: the publisher states on its own contact page that it currently makes no money, and the terms reserve the right to charge later. None of that diminishes what Rooms offers today. It simply means treating it as a delightful personal and educational tool rather than a business dependency.
- Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.
- Opens in a new window.