Common Room

Persistent branded AR communities — before "spatial computing" had a name

Born as Avenues ARea — an AR exhibition platform where students presented work in shared spaces with live voice chat — the concept quickly outgrew education. Common Room let any organization create persistent, branded communities built around shared spatial experiences rather than web pages: themed rooms populated through a web-based CMS, an approval workflow keeping content curated, and lightweight moderation in which the first participant became host and voice was capped to protect conversation quality. Participants gathered around digital objects and discovered ideas together, as if walking a gallery. Common Room anticipated much of what spatial computing now takes as given: creator-managed spaces, persistent content, and communities organized around shared experience instead of feeds.