Tag: Teooh

Roomkey: A Brief Introduction

Roomkey (formerly called Teooh) is a free virtual world platform that is available for Windows and Macintosh desktop computers, as well as Android and iOS mobile devices. Much like Mozilla Hubs and VirBELA, Roomkey supports a wide variety of devices, which make it a good choice for applications where you need to reach as many different kinds of people as possible. (There’s no virtual reality mode, though.)

You get to set up your profile, design your avatar, and then you visit rooms where events are taking place. For example, I have been invited to attend a presentation with Twitter cofounder Biz Stone on May 27th, 2021, which is when Roomkey will be launched at a press conference. Although you cannot walk around, you can move your avatar from one seat to another to get a better view of the stage (a feature similar to Bigscreen and vTime XR). You can also use your finger to change your viewpoint in the three-dimensional space.

Here’s a couple of views of one of the conference rooms:

You can use either text chat or voice chat to communicate with other avatars around you.

One example of how Roomkey is being used is the Yale Career Panels, a series of discussions created to give Yale students and alumni a candid view of a variety of professions, the myths and misconceptions about each industry, its outlook, the types of people who do well and are happy in the career, and how to succeed in the profession. More information and a registration form is available on the Roomkey website.

For more information about Roomkey, visit their website, or follow the company on social media: Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, or YouTube. Here’s an example from their YouTube channel, a one-hour video of a conversation with Reebok founder Joe Foster:

I will be adding Roomkey to my ever-expanding list of social VR and virtual world platforms (which I promise to reorganize and recategorize soon!).

Teooh: A Brief Introduction

UPDATE May 12th, 2021: Teooh is now called Roomkey; here is an updated review.

I swear, they must be running out of names for new metaverse platforms! (I kept typing in “Teeoh” instead of “Teooh” when searching for this one, or while writing up this blogpost.)

Teooh (currently in beta) describes itself as follows in their FAQ:

On Teooh you can create virtual events and monetize them by selling tickets. Your guests can attend as an avatar and hear speakers, socialise and network with others. All this through their laptop and mobile phone. In short, if the Sims did paid events Teooh would be it.

Teooh appears to offer several different kinds of virtual spaces for your event:

Here’a a one-minute promotional video to give you a feel:

Here’s a longer, twelve-minute video showing you a bit more of the platform:

There’s precious little technical information about Teooh on their website, and no pricing info available. All the individual customer use cases in the “For Customers” drop-down menu point to essentially the same text and images, repeated over and over for each case. Someone really needs to put some more work to this new platform’s website.

From what I can tell, this is primarily a service for desktop and mobile devices. TechCrunch reports:

Teooh won’t be available in VR, instead focusing on mobile and desktop platforms, hoping to pitch an alternative to teleconferencing software like Zoom that is more bespoke for meetups where participants can single out and chat with individual users in a virtual environment.

So, I would classify Teeoh (damn, I mean Teooh!) as a virtual world with mobile support. And frankly, I think that a nonsense word like Teooh is a terrible, terrible name for a product. (In my opinion, it ranks right up there with Twinity and Beloola for stupid platform names.) The company behing Teeoh needs to reach out to a professional branding consultant and change it.

If you want more information on Teooh, you can visit their website, or follow them on social media: Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube (and the link to their Twitter account from their website is broken, another sign that somebody is not paying attention to details).

It would appear that Teooh is now taking applications from parties who are interested in using the beta platform for their events; the application form is here (just click on the button “Apply for Batch #2”).

Thanks to Neobela for the heads-up!