Introducing the Widget Watch

Rec Room Official
1

Introducing the Widget Watch

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. :sparkles:

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.

Widget Watch’s portal panel, navigating to the play menu
Widget Watch’s quick access panel, navigating to outfits and parties Older navigation for outfits and parties
31 Likes
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This looks amazing.

My only concern is this is yet another UI style on the existing watch, adding on to new player confusion and general UI inconsistency.

Please prioritize moving all of the watch to this new style before releasing it. Don’t repeat the mistakes of RRUI.

27 Likes
5

i think this is a good idea in concept, but it seems to be out of place in terms of the style rec room’s ui currently is, and it feels a bit redundant if i’m being honest, considering the watch already has most of these things front and center when you open it
consider giving players the choice to use new ui updates or not, it can be extremely disorienting to get used to, especially if you haven’t played the game in a while
however when i say this, i don’t mean that we should have a choice but eventually have it taken away (a la classic bean setting)

6 Likes
6

Looks better and snappier, but it’s just adding to the UI inconsistencies… Couldn’t you say it’s a bit disorienting to be in a small, easily digestible menu on the side of your screen then be blasted when hitting “Play?” Plus, something about it doesn’t fit… I think it’s mainly the random (but nice) art style RR took for this menu, and how it doesn’t look anything like what we’ve seen before and what it’s being integrated into

I’m not sure what to say about my opinion but I’m proud Rec Room is (Kind of) fixing one of their biggest issues.

6 Likes
7

i aggree

8

100% agree. Im really glad they’re reworking the UI, but I really hope they eventually get to doing the rest of the UI, and maybe even a dark mode

5 Likes
9

this looks good. i hope you could 1 change the color of the ui (this could be a rr+ thing) or 2 be able to move the buttons around, for example move the create button down to the bottom of the watch. or in general move the categories around.

4 Likes
10

oh my peak, i can’t wait to fully adopt this UI

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Yeah! Once we’ve got signal on how this UI performs and we’ve seen the community feedback after trying it out, we’re really excited to execute on our plans to update more of the menus and get that UI in a more consistent space.

5 Likes
12

Unbeliably Peam. a bit out of style for the rest of the watch, but thats something that can be worked on :slight_smile:

13

This looks great but I feel like we should possibly make it a bit more colorful? Or customizable?

1 Like
14

I have to tell my friends about this!

15

I think this one is a keeper. Love the design language, and I hope it spreads to the rest of the ui soon.

1 Like
16

Thank you for sharing the update on the Widget Watch! I’m excited to see the improvements in the user interface and performance :heart_eyes:

17

I wish there was a way to turn it on and off so you can use the old ui and the new ui.

1 Like
18

Ur 100% right. I’d also release it to VR and Screen players at the same time instead of just screen, but im not a dev so.

20

Great concept, but the latest watch UI was released just a few years ago, thus bribg me mixed signals with a reason why there’s a new UI concept when the current one was pushed out not so long ago

1 Like
21

very cool, i must make a vid about this

1 Like
22

To say, the outfits thingy might help some new players to see where they can change their outfits tbh

23

This is really cool! But by looking at this, I can see this was meant for screenmode. I hope when they port this to VR, it won’t just be lazy and copy and paste it and make it look weird.

I also hope those buttons have an ACTUAL 3D effect on VR.

2 Likes