Last updated: 2026-06-13
Marble by World Labs turns text, images, video, or panoramas into explorable 3D worlds. Free tier gives 4 worlds/month; paid plans start at $20/month.
Marble is World Labs' generative world model, launched in 2025, that turns text prompts, images, panoramas, or video into persistent, explorable 3D environments. Pricing runs from a free tier (7,000 credits, about 4 worlds per month) to $95 per month for the Max plan, with a separate World API priced at $1.00 per 1,250 credits. Worlds export as Gaussian splats or meshes for Unreal, Unity, and Blender.
Marble is the flagship product of World Labs, the spatial intelligence startup founded in January 2024 by Fei-Fei Li and a team of NeRF, ImageNet, and Gaussian Splatting researchers. Marble launched in limited beta in November 2025 and moved to a formal commercial launch in early 2026, backed by World Labs' $1.23 billion in total funding. It is a multimodal generative world model: instead of producing a flat image or video clip, Marble takes a text prompt, a single photo, a set of photos, a 360-degree panorama, a video, or a rough 3D layout and turns it into a persistent, spatially consistent 3D environment that a user can walk through, edit, and export. The core mechanism that sets Marble apart is its focus on spatial consistency and editability rather than raw image quality. A built-in tool called Chisel lets creators block out a scene with simple geometric shapes, after which the model fills in detailed geometry, materials, lighting, and style. Generated worlds can be expanded outward from a small starting scene or stitched together with other generated worlds into one larger connected environment, which is useful for building game levels or large VFX sets piece by piece. Output can be downloaded as Gaussian splats (.ply or .spz, in full 2-million-point resolution or a lightweight 500K version for real-time playback) or as standard polygon meshes (OBJ, FBX) that drop directly into Unreal Engine, Unity, Blender, and Houdini. Marble's best-fit users are game environment artists and level designers who want to generate base terrain and architecture before hand-finishing in an engine, VFX and previsualization artists who need quick 3D sets built from reference photos, architectural visualization designers turning site photos or layouts into client walkthroughs, and XR/VR developers who can view generated worlds in WebXR on Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3. A typical workflow is photographing a real location and having Marble generate an explorable 3D version of it within minutes, ready to export into a game engine. Marble's web subscription runs on a credit system with four tiers: Free (7,000 credits/month, about 4 worlds), Standard ($20/month, 20,000 credits, about 12 worlds), Pro ($35/month, 40,000 credits, about 25 worlds, includes commercial usage rights), and Max ($95/month). Marble is available through the web, including VR browsers on Vision Pro and Quest 3. In January 2026, World Labs launched the World API, a separate developer interface that exposes Marble's generation pipeline programmatically for games, simulations, and robotics pipelines. The API is billed at $1.00 per 1,250 credits (minimum purchase 6,250 credits, or $5), with a standard world generation costing 1,500 credits on Marble 1.0 or 1.1, and lower-fidelity drafts costing 150 credits. Community-built MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers also let AI assistants like Claude trigger Marble world generation directly from a chat session, though World Labs has not published an official first-party MCP server as of mid-2026.
Free: 7,000 credits/month (about 4 world generations). Standard $20/month (20,000 credits, ~12 worlds). Pro $35/month (40,000 credits, ~25 worlds, includes commercial usage rights). Max $95/month. World API billed separately via credits at $1.00 per 1,250 credits (minimum purchase 6,250 credits / $5); a standard world generation costs 1,500 credits (Marble 1.0/1.1) or 150 credits for drafts.
Marble is World Labs' flagship generative world model, launched in limited beta in November 2025 and formally in early 2026 by Fei-Fei Li's San Francisco startup, which has raised $1.23 billion in funding. It is a multimodal AI system that turns a text prompt, a single image, multiple photos, a 360-degree panorama, a video, or a rough 3D layout into a persistent, explorable 3D environment. Generated worlds are spatially consistent, meaning you can move through them and the geometry stays coherent rather than warping like older 2D-to-3D tools. Marble includes an AI-assisted editing tool called Chisel that lets you block out a scene with simple shapes and have the model fill in detail, color, and style. Worlds can be expanded outward from a small starting scene or stitched together with other generated worlds into one larger connected space. Output can be downloaded as Gaussian splats (.ply or .spz, full 2-million-splat resolution or a lightweight 500K version) or as standard 3D meshes (OBJ, FBX) for use in Unreal Engine, Unity, Blender, and Houdini. Marble is positioned as the consumer- and creator-facing front end of World Labs' broader spatial intelligence research, alongside the developer-focused World API.
Marble uses a freemium, credit-based subscription model with four tiers as of mid-2026. The Free tier includes 7,000 credits per month, enough for roughly 4 world generations, and is intended for testing quality rather than production work. The Standard tier costs $20 per month for 20,000 credits, covering about 12 worlds. The Pro tier costs $35 per month for 40,000 credits, covering about 25 worlds, and is the entry point for commercial usage rights. The Max tier costs $95 per month for the highest credit allowance and heaviest usage. Separately, the World API for developers is billed at a fixed rate of $1.00 per 1,250 credits, with a minimum purchase of 6,250 credits, or $5. A standard world generation via the API costs 1,500 credits on Marble 1.0 or 1.1, while a lower-fidelity draft generation costs 150 credits. Because the web subscription and the API use separate credit pools, teams that use both should budget for both line items.
Marble's core feature is multimodal world generation: it accepts text prompts, single or multiple images, 360-degree panoramas, videos, or rough 3D block-outs as input and produces a persistent, navigable 3D environment. Its Chisel tool lets creators sketch a scene's layout with simple geometric shapes and have the AI generate detailed geometry, materials, and lighting on top of that layout. World expansion lets users grow a small generated scene outward, and World Labs also supports combining multiple separately generated worlds into one larger connected environment, useful for game levels or large VFX sets. Export options include Gaussian splats (.ply/.spz, in full 2-million-point or lightweight 500K versions) for real-time web viewers, and standard meshes (OBJ, FBX) for game engines and 3D software. Generated worlds can be viewed in VR via WebXR on headsets like Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3. For developers, the World API, launched January 2026, exposes the same generation pipeline programmatically, with Marble 1.0, Marble 1.1, and an auto-expanding Marble 1.1 Plus mode. Community-built MCP servers also let AI assistants like Claude trigger Marble world generation directly from a chat interface.
Yes, Marble has a free tier that includes 7,000 credits per month, which World Labs says is enough for roughly 4 world generations from text, image, or panorama input. The free tier is useful for testing the quality of generated worlds or doing a single small personal project, but it does not include commercial usage rights and its monthly cap is too low for regular production work. To unlock more generations and faster iteration, the Standard plan at $20 per month provides 20,000 credits (about 12 worlds), and commercial rights become available starting at the Pro plan, $35 per month for 40,000 credits (about 25 worlds). There is no traditional time-limited free trial of the paid tiers; instead, the free tier itself functions as an ongoing, capped trial. Developers who want to test the World API separately need to fund their account with a minimum purchase of 6,250 credits ($5), since the consumer free tier's credits do not carry over to API usage. Anyone evaluating Marble for a client project should budget for at least the Pro tier given the commercial-rights requirement.
Marble's most direct competitor is Google DeepMind's Genie 3, a general-purpose world model that generates richly interactive 3D environments in real time at up to 24 frames per second and 720p, and is a better choice if your priority is real-time interactivity over exportable static assets. Runway is another alternative, focused on AI video generation and editing; choose Runway if your end deliverable is a 2D video rather than a navigable 3D scene or game-ready mesh. Midjourney remains the go-to if you need fast, high-quality 2D concept art or still images rather than 3D geometry, since Marble's output is built around spatial consistency rather than image aesthetics alone. Odyssey-2 is worth considering if you want real-time, prompt-reactive interactive video rather than a downloadable persistent 3D world. For teams that want open-weight models they can fine-tune or self-host, Stability AI's image and video models are a more flexible, if less turnkey, option than Marble's closed API. The right choice generally comes down to whether you need an exportable, editable 3D asset (Marble), a 2D video (Runway or Odyssey-2), or a still image (Midjourney).
Marble is best suited for game environment artists who want to quickly block out levels or generate base terrain and architecture before hand-finishing in Unreal or Unity. It is also a strong fit for VFX and previsualization artists who need to rapidly generate 3D sets for film and video from reference photos or panoramas. Architectural visualization designers can use Marble to turn rough 3D layouts or site photos into explorable walkthroughs for clients. XR and VR developers benefit from Marble's WebXR support, letting them prototype spatial experiences for Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3 without building scenes from scratch. A typical use case is a solo indie developer photographing a real location and using Marble to generate a playable 3D version of that space within minutes, then exporting it as a mesh into their game engine. Marble is less suited to users who just want quick 2D images or memes, or to teams needing photorealistic human character generation, since its strength is environments and spatial layouts rather than characters or people. It also is not ideal for budget-conscious hobbyists doing more than occasional projects, since the free tier's 4 worlds per month is restrictive.
Yes. World Labs launched the World API in January 2026 as a public interface to Marble's world-generation engine, separate from the consumer Marble web app. The API lets developers generate navigable 3D worlds programmatically from text, images, panoramas, multi-view image sets, or video, and integrate the output into games, simulations, web experiences, or robotics pipelines. It is billed on a credit basis at $1.00 per 1,250 credits, with a minimum purchase of 6,250 credits ($5); a standard world generation costs 1,500 credits on Marble 1.0 or 1.1, while lower-fidelity drafts cost 150 credits, and the auto-expanding Marble 1.1 Plus mode adds 300 credits per additional dynamic cube. Some API operations, like API key creation, media upload, and operation polling, do not consume credits. Developers get API keys from platform.worldlabs.ai. MCP support exists through community-built servers, such as open-source projects on GitHub, that let AI assistants like Claude call the World API directly to generate or import 3D worlds during a conversation. World Labs has not published an official first-party MCP server as of mid-2026, so MCP access currently depends on these third-party implementations.
Marble and Genie 3 both fall into the 2026 world model category but take different approaches. Genie 3, from Google DeepMind, generates richly interactive 3D environments in real time, up to 24 frames per second at 720p, with the world reacting live to user input for several minutes, making it closer to an interactive simulation engine. Marble instead focuses on generating persistent, downloadable 3D assets, exportable as Gaussian splats or meshes, that creators can bring into existing pipelines like Unreal, Unity, or Blender for further work. In practice, Genie 3 is better suited to research and real-time agent training environments, while Marble is better suited to creators who need a concrete, editable 3D deliverable they own and can reuse. Pricing also differs: Marble has public consumer pricing from free to $95 per month plus a metered World API, whereas Genie 3 has been positioned primarily as a research preview without equivalent public consumer pricing as of mid-2026. For commercial rights and asset ownership, Marble's Pro tier ($35/month) and above are the clearer path, while Genie 3 access has been more limited and research-focused. Teams choosing between the two should pick Marble if they need a 3D asset to take elsewhere, and Genie 3 if they need a live, reactive simulated environment.