Rec Room is one of the most advanced of the extant “metaverse” apps, despite very clearly being aimed at children. Again, I focused on building in Rec Room and though the app has mature tools for building and logic (programming objects), space creation is restricted to a sort of “house style” with the tools on offer. The in-game build tools themselves are also quite eccentric, though experimental integration with Unity is available through Rec Room Studio.
Rec Room is significantly older than Horizon Worlds, the nearest analogue (9 vs 4 years old. Estimates vary widely and it’s difficult to know what the consistent size of the “active” user base is – but Rec Room is more popular than Horizon Worlds too.
Like Horizon Worlds, Rec Rooms is a Metaverse app, but with a greater focus on gaming than social. Perhaps because of the active user-base of creators.
Feelings
Pottering around and tinkering with tools in Rec Room is fun – although I personally felt uncomfortable with some of the social aspects, perhaps because so many of the participants running around are young kids! An odd side effect of joining a virtual world in the form of an avatar is that everyone is equalised visually, but in Rec Room you can hear kids chatting to each other. There’s much of the playground about it! Would that make it a poor choice to share journalism content?
Most visits were spent getting used to the UI and doing some rudimentary building. I found building a little frustrating, as the built-in tool is styled as a sort of paint gun. Achieving precise outcomes is difficult (for me), and I cannot imagine having the patience (or time) to build spaces for storytelling with the platform.
The discovery that there is a limited program for importing experiences from Unity may change that.
Evaluation
The key challenge really was getting used to the building tools – the Maker Pen – which is not particularly intuitive and is clunky to use. Switching in and out of modes is cumbersome. Creating in other apps (SketchUp etc) and importing through Unity might be easier. The ability to join spaces/rooms together easily means that it would be relatively straightforward (relatively being operative) to create an interconnected hub of journalism experiences with interactivity built in – using the metaphor of an evolving news-building or similar.. However, there’s a lack of video support, which might make some of that authorship difficult.
Conclusions
I still feel there is much to learn about Rec Room. There is a lot of depth to the built-in space building tools – and logic programming – but it would need better multimedia support before it could be used successfully for creating VR journalism. However, as a prototyping tool, there’s potential.