What if you get a 1 day free trial to live with your potential roommate in a cramped apartment? 🏠

NoSpareRoom is a co-located, cooperative mixed reality (WebXR) experience that reimagines shared living. Players must work together to fulfill their needs while actively respecting each other’s space, turning everyday roommate dynamics into interactive gameplay.

This work is a 48-hour sprint made in response to the prompt given by Playful NYC Hackathon, hosted by Parsons New School Creative Technology Club & the Innovation Center XR Lab: "Interpret the city as a space for play — turning familiar NYC experiences into mechanics, translating city behaviors into alternative inputs, or creating systems that capture the rhythm and energy of urban life."

My team members -- Aditya De, Eros Carrasco, Richard Q. Li and I are all international and we all face the same issue when arriving in NYC: it is hard to find landlord that will accept us and a good roommate due to not having any history of living in the US. Apart from this issue, we believe a lot of New Yorkers are also facing similar issues where in a bustling city like NYC, you have to face the fact that (1) roommates come in and out and (2) the typical unit that is under $1000 of rent is limited in space. These combinations of unpredictable roommate and cramped space may result in possible conflicts of living needs.

Our project answers this challenge with another challenge: "Try living with a someone before committing as roommates". It is a cooperation-based WebXR game where the goal of winning is to ensure both you and your roommate living needs are both fulfilled. The twist? You have to take turn to use specific combination of house appliances. For example, you cannot use the same appliance at the same time, or you cannot play computer while your roommate is taking a nap because the computer is only accessible by folding the bed away.

The game begins with a landlord voice coming from a watch on player's left wrist -- welcoming both players to NYC and explaining that they have 1 day free trial to live together in the apartment. If by the end of the trial they both have fulfilled most of their needs, the landlord will agree to rent the apartment to both of them, or in other words, players win. Players can check the stats of their needs by looking at their wristwatch. The needs will decay over time and may be affected by actions of fulfilling other needs.

We picked out the 5 most basic needs to be featured in this game:

Needs — Activity to fulfill it

🍴Hunger — Cooking

🚽 Poop — Pooping

🧼 Hygiene — Showering

💤 Sleep — Sleeping

🎮 Fun — Playing computer

A central part of the game is to design the restrictions players will encounter when using the house appliances. This is done by making different combinations of house appliances that need to be folded in order to make space for other appliances.

The apartment design itself is inspired by the typical brownstone unit of NYC.

Demonstration of the convertible appliances in the apartment

🗣️ The game depends on your initiative to solve this with your roommate with real life communication.

Important technology that are integrated in our system are:
📍📍 Co-location (shared space LAN multiplayers) → ThreeJS + WebXR

🧠 AI-powered landlord

→ Gemini API to generate the script for tenant review

→ ElevenLabs to generate a realistic voice audio of a male landlord with American accent

→ a soft onboarding and tenant review. This practice is to apply complex game onboarding as part of narrative storytelling

📊 Needs stat + clock → indication of player performance

💥 Collider setup → interaction with house appliances

🔊 Sounds → indicate actions & time

🛌 Real life setup → floor for bed and a seat for toilet

👽 Github → monorepo structure & clear task divisions

A thought that comes to me after making this co-op site-specific game is that interactions don't have to always be embedded into game controllers/joysticks, sometimes, the best interface is our own body and our verbal communication with other players.

Your communication, empathy, and respect are your best asset to be the best roommate.