Posted by meetpateltech 11/12/2025
also check out their interactive examples on the webapp. It's a bit more rough around the edges but shows real user input/output. Arguably such examples could be pushed further to better quality output.
e.g. https://marble.worldlabs.ai/world/b75af78a-b040-4415-9f42-6d...
e.g. https://marble.worldlabs.ai/world/cbd8d6fb-4511-4d2c-a941-f4...
It's worlds better than just doing gaussian splats from images, but given how much the quality is influenced by images the limit to four images with text prompt or eight images without prompt is quite limiting. That's plenty to describe a chair, but almost nothing to describe a home or a space station. I hope they can extend those limits in future updates
As a game developer I'm looking for:
• Export low-poly triangle mesh (ideally OBJ or FBX format — something fairly generic, nothing too fancy) • Export texture map • Export normals • Bonus: export the scene as "de-structured" objects (e.g. instead of a giant world mesh with everything baked into it, separate exports for foreground and background objects to make it more game engine-ready.
Gaussian splats are awesome, but not critical for my current renderers. Cool to have though.
From my understanding, admittedly quite a shallow look so far, the model generates gaussian splats then from that could implement the collider.
I guess from the splat and the colliders you could generate actual assets that could be interactable/animated/have physics etc. Unsure, exciting space though! I just don't know how I would properly use this in a game, the examples are all quite on-rails and seem to avoid interacting too much with stuff in the environment.
However, to my eye, the triangular meshes shown look pretty low quality compared to the splat: compare the triangulated books on the shelves, and the wooden chair by the door, as well as weird hole-like defects in the blanket by the fireplace.
It's also not clear if it's generating one mesh for the entire world, it looks like it is - that would make interactability and optimisation more difficult (no frustrum culling etc, though you could feasibly chop the mesh up into smaller pieces I suppose).
IMO LLM more or less literally cannot do what they do without a world model, not least because much of what language is, is a protocol for making assertions about that model, testing the degree to which it is shared, and seeking to alter the model one carries of one's interlocutor's model.
To the "parrot people" I suggest, there is no more optimized mechanism for the inner layers of a network to approach than one which most parsimoniously models the world, so as to correctly emit tokens reflective of that.
I wonder how their approaches and results compare?
Marble renders a static Gaussian Splat asset (like a 3D game engine asset) that you then render in a game engine.
Marble seems useful for lots of use cases - 3D design, online games, etc. You pay the GPU cost to render once, then you can reuse it.
Genie seems revolutionary but expensive af to render and deliver to end users. You never stop paying boatloads of H100 costs (probably several H100s or TPU equivalents per user session) per second.
You could make a VRChat type game with Marble.
You could make a VRChat game with Genie, but only the billionaires could afford to play it.
To be clear, Genie does some remarkably cool things. You can prompt it, "T-Rex tap dancing by" and it'll appear animated in the world. I don't think any other system can do this. But the cost is enormous and it's why we don't have a playable demo.
When the cost of GPU compute comes down, I'm sure we'll all be steaming a Google Stadia like experience of "games" rendered on the fly. Multiplayer, with Hollywood grade visuals. Like playing real time Lord of the Rings or something wild.
Interestingly, there is a model like Google Genie that is open source and available to run on your local Nvidia desktop GPU. It's called DiamondWM [1], and it's a world model trained on FPS gameplay footage. It generates a 10 fps 160x160 image you can play through. Maybe we'll develop better models and faster techniques and the dream of local world models can one day be realized.
AI can speed up asset development, but that is not a major bottleneck for video games, what matters is the creative game design and backend systems, which existing on the interaction between players and systems is just about as hard as any management role, if not harder.
I work in AI and, to this day, I don't know what they mean by “world” in “world model”.
> I work in AI and, to this day, I don't know what they mean by “world” in “world model”.
But "a physics" can be a model that describes any world, not just the one we live in. For ML models, this should be based on the data they're processing. Ideally we'd want this to be similar to our own, but if it is modeling a "world" where pi=3, then that's still "a physics".
The key points here are that a physics is a counterfactual description of the environment. You have to have language to formalize relationships between objects. In standard physics (and most of science) we use math[0], though we use several languages (different algebras, different groups, different branches, etc) of math to describe different phenomena. But the point is that an equation is designed to be the maximum compression of that description. I don't really care if you use numbers or symbols, what matters is if you have counterfactual, testable, consistent, and concise descriptions of "the world".
Oddly enough, there are a lot of physicists and former physicists that work in ML but it is fairly uncommon for them to be working on "world modeling." I can tell you from my own experience talking to people who research world models that they respond to my concerns as "we just care if it works" as if that is also not my primary concern. Who the fuck isn't concerned with that? Philosophers?
[0] It can be easy to read "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" out of context as we're >60 years past where math has been the lingua Franca of science. But math is a language, we invented it, and it should be surprising that this language is so powerful that we can work out the motion of the stars from a piece of paper. Math is really the closest thing we have to a magical language https://web.archive.org/web/20210212111540/http://www.dartmo...
We don't need to agree on one very specific meaning, which is good, because we would fail.
Combine these 2, and we can have moving cameras as needed (long takes). This is going to make storytelling very expressive.
Incredible times! Here's a bet: We'll have a AI superstar (A-list level) in the next 12 months.
I’m willing to take that bet. Name any amount you’re willing to lose.
Before you agree: movies take more than 1 year to make and get published, and it takes more than 1 movie to make somebody an a-lister
Same terms - gentlemen's agreement. The loser owes the winner a meal whenever they meet :). For a HN visitor to blore, I'll happy to host a meal anyway :)
finally! we should come up for a term for this new tech... maybe computer generated imagery?
Looking at the worlds generated here https://marble.worldlabs.ai/ it looks a lot more like they are just doing image generation for a multiview stereo 360 panoramas and then reprojecting that into space. The generations exhibit all the same image artifacts that come from this type of scanning/reconstruction work, all the same data shadow artifacts, etc.
This is more of a glorified image generator, a far cry from a "world model".
I agree RTFM is in more of the "right" direction here, and what is presented here is a bit of a derivative of that. Which makes this release so much more crass, as it seems like a ploy to get platform buy in from users more so than a release of a "world model".
If you go in with the expectation that you give it a single image and it's doing gaussian splatting from a single image and a prompt it's phenomenal. If you deviate too far from the image viewpoint it breaks down, but it looks decent long enough to be very usable. But if you go in with the expectation that it's generating "worlds" it's not very good. This only passes as a world in a 20 second tech demo where the user isn't given camera controls
My best guess is that they are forced (by investors, lack of investors, fear of the AI bubble, or whatever) to release something, and this was something they could polish up to production quality and host with reasonable GPU resources