It’s official: we are starting to run out of sensible product names, people. Companies are rummaging through all the leftover domain names, and it shows.
Rooom (yes, with three O’s, which apparently are meant to signify the 3 dimensions of space 🙄) is a German company which tries really, really hard to make it sound as if they already provide social VR services, but really, they don’t.
Oh, they talk about it, for sure:
Events with unlimited scalability
eventCloud has been successfully used for global events with more than 200,000 simultaneous participants. Accessible through virtually any internet-enabled device, online events in 3D are possible without the need for a VR headset.
But take a good, close look at the YouTube video for this:
I’m seeing a lot of flat-screen technology integration (Zoom-like videoconferencing, etc.), and the use of emojis and whatnot, but I am not seeing social VR! The only avatar I see in this promo video is the user him-or-herself. All of the other “avatars” at the briefly-glimpsed trade show above are the digital equivalent of flat, cardboard cutouts! Here’s another video:
Again, look at all the flat cutout “avatars”!! Rooom may have hosted events boasting over 200,000 participants, but all those participants seem to have experienced the virtual space alone, as far as I can tell. Compared to other social VR platforms already out there, with much more impressive feature sets, this is extremely underwhelming and disappointing. I’m not impressed by this at all.
Frankly, based on my perusal of their website, everything that Rooom offers so far seems to revolve around creating 3D virtual environments for business, without actually offering something that I would call actual social VR—that is, a virtual space which you can visit and interact with other real people using avatars.
However, there is mention of something Rooom is working on, called nu.land, which basically consists of nothing but a slick (and slow-loading) website:
So I am somewhat mystified as to how Rooom raised US$7 million for its so-called “multifaceted 3D virtual events platform”. Go ahead, take a good look through the website yourself, and check out the YouTube videos. I’m not seeing a whole hell of a lot of groundbreaking stuff here, to be honest.
I’m not even going to bother adding Room and nu.land to my comprehensive list of social VR and virtual worlds at this point. There’s no “there” there, at least not yet.
