We’ve been working on updating our user interface (UI). UI is basically the buttons, menus, and screens you see and use in-game. It’s what helps you navigate to the rooms you want to see, customize your character, create, and more.

Because we update Rec Room so frequently, our UI is under a lot of pressure to support new features but still be simple and easy to use. Over time, those menus became overwhelming and slowed down. So, we got to work and now we’re ready to share a preview of the Widget Watch.

The Widget Watch is designed to make Rec Room’s interface more intuitive and immersive. Instead of navigating through multiple screens and tabs that take up the whole screen, you’ll have quick access to essential features while still seeing everything around you. We also learned how to balance development speed and performance more - Widget Watch uses less backend code than the older Rec Room UI, so it loads quicker and has fewer bugs for you, and it takes our designers and developers weeks instead of months to make player-ready UI.

We don’t want to tell you all how much better it is. We want you to use it and test it. We’ve already been taking your feedback and building it into the Widget Watch. After a pretty good beta test with some of our most passionate UI-focused players, including the indefatigable TheLuchenator, we’re ready to roll this out to mobile, PC and console players…as an experiment.

Look, we know you don’t love split tests. But when we’re making changes this big, we kind of have to. This test will have four versions of the Widget Watch with different menus and behaviors. This will help us understand what menus are most important in real-time gameplay, and discover any bugs or performance issues we wouldn’t see easily in our beta tests.

We’ll be starting this test next week on March 5th and our plan is to run it for six weeks. We’ll come back with what we’ve learned from those results.

VR players - we want to get this in your hands too, but we’re not quite ready for that test yet. We’re making some extra tweaks so the Widget Watch feels like it’s got that 3D magic. ✨

Our UI is something we’d call a target-rich environment– there’s a heap of work to do. Once we’ve got signal on how this UI performs out in the real (Rec Room) world and we’ve seen your feedback, we’ve got a plan to finish the job, including updating the big watch menus, that really old outfit UI, and adding personalization options.

If there’s something you’d love to see in the new UI - or if there’s something you think we missed— let us know in this forum post or on our Discord. And check out the demos below.