Atlas vs Marble: World Labs’ two world models compared

World Labs now ships two world models with confusingly similar goals. Marble is the product you can pay for today: a 3D world generator with an editor and a public API. Atlas, announced on September 1, 2026, is the research-grade omni model that adds camera-controlled video and few-view reconstruction, and is limited to early-access partners. This page, from an independent site not affiliated with World Labs, compares them dimension by dimension with dated sources.

TL;DR

If you need a 3D environment in your engine this month, use Marble through the World API. If you need long, camera-controlled video, faithful reconstruction from two or three photos, or a simulator for robots, that is what Atlas was built for, and you will need to request early access. Everything below explains why.

Timeline of World Labs’ models

• November 12, 2025. Marble launches as World Labs’ first commercial product, generating navigable 3D worlds from text and images (TechCrunch).
• January 21, 2026. The World API opens Marble to developers with text, single-image, multi-image, panorama and video inputs (World Labs).
• February 2026. World Labs closes a $1 billion round with Autodesk, AMD, NVIDIA and Fidelity, bringing total funding to $1.23 billion (Dealroom).
• April 2, 2026. Marble 1.1 becomes the default model, with Marble 1.1 Plus adding auto-expanding “dynamic cubes” (Radiance Fields).
• September 1, 2026. Atlas is announced in early access, described as building on the Marble model (SiliconANGLE, Dealroom).

The lineage matters: Atlas is not a rival to Marble inside World Labs, it is the next layer. That makes the World API the safest thing to build on today, because whatever Atlas exposes will most likely arrive on the same platform.

Outputs compared

Marble produces a single, bounded, explorable 3D world. You navigate it in the browser, edit it, and export it as Gaussian splats in .spz or .ply, as a mesh, or as a rendered fly-through video (Radiance Fields). Marble 1.1 Plus can grow the world with additional “dynamic cubes,” up to five extra spatial units per expansion (Radiance Fields). The world is the product; video is a by-product.

Atlas produces two kinds of output. First, image and video frames at up to 1440p and up to one minute in length, rendered along a camera path you supply (Superpower Daily). Second, explicit 3D: point clouds that the model fills into complete Gaussian-splat scenes (Dealroom). Video is a first-class output, not an export.

In practice the splat outputs of both models land in the same tools. You can open either in the online splat viewer and follow the same Unity and Unreal import steps.

Inputs and reconstruction

Both models accept text and images, but they weight them differently.

Marble’s World API takes a text prompt, a single image, several images, a 360° panorama, or a video, and generates a world that matches the reference (World Labs). Multi-image input helps consistency, but Marble is fundamentally a generator: it produces a plausible world that resembles your images.

Atlas is positioned as a reconstructor as much as a generator. It accepts from one to more than 100 reference images, and World Labs claims that “with just two or three images, Atlas delivers faithful results and outperforms specialized 3D models” (The Decoder). It also takes depth maps, point clouds and camera paths natively. If your goal is a digital twin of a real room rather than an imagined one, that is the Atlas use case, and the claim is self-reported until independent tests appear.

Camera control and video

This is the sharpest difference.

Marble worlds are static scenes. You can render a video by moving a virtual camera through the exported world, and the result is consistent because it is a real 3D scene, but the video is bounded by what the world contains.

Atlas treats the camera path as an input to generation. World Labs’ one-line description is a model that “generates image and video frames with pixel-perfect camera control and reconstructs them in 3D” (World Labs on X). The model renders new content as the camera moves, at up to 1440p for up to a minute, so it can travel beyond the bounds of a captured scene while staying consistent with it. For film previs, product shots and robot camera views, that is a capability Marble does not have. The detail is covered in what the Atlas world model does.

Export formats and workflow

Marble’s export list is public: Gaussian splats as .spz and .ply, meshes, and video, with PLY splat export free through the API (Radiance Fields). That is enough for Unity, Unreal, Blender and WebGL viewers via Spark.

Atlas outputs point clouds and Gaussian splats “that render on device” (Dealroom), plus video frames. World Labs has not published file formats or an export API for Atlas, so assume splats in the same family as Marble and treat mesh export as unknown as of September 3, 2026.

API and pricing today

Only Marble has an API and a price list.

The World API generates a world with a single request to the generate endpoint using the marble-1.1 model, and exposes a credits endpoint for balance checks (docs.worldlabs.ai). Credits cost $1 per 1,250, with a $5 minimum purchase of 6,250 credits; a Marble 1.1 world costs 1,500 credits, roughly $1.20, and Marble 1.1 Plus charges 1,500 plus 300 per extra cube (Radiance Fields). API credits do not expire and are separate from the web app’s credits, as of September 3, 2026. Worked examples are on the pricing page and the request flow is in the Marble World API guide.

Atlas has no public API, no published price and no general-availability date (Implicator). The Atlas World Model API page tracks that status and explains how this site’s own API layer will route the same request to Atlas when it opens.

Benchmarks

World Labs reported that human raters preferred Atlas in 75 to 94 percent of comparisons on camera-controlled generation and few-view reconstruction (AlphaSignal). Those figures are self-reported and not independently reproduced, and Marble was not named among the baselines in public coverage. Marble itself has no published benchmark. Neither number should drive a purchasing decision yet; see Atlas benchmarks explained.

Which should you use?

Game and XR developers. Marble, today. You get an exportable splat or mesh in minutes for about $1.20, and the game development workflow is documented. Revisit Atlas when it exposes an API, because few-view reconstruction of real locations is a level-design shortcut.

Robotics teams. Atlas is the one built for real-to-sim: phone-video capture, reconstruction, simulated robot views and augmented variations (Spatial Insider). Request early access, and prototype the capture pipeline with Marble meanwhile, as described in the robotics guide.

Film, VFX and previs. Atlas, for camera-controlled 1440p video. Until you have access, Marble worlds plus a virtual camera in your DCC tool cover static-scene shots.

Researchers. Atlas is the more interesting object of study, but without a paper or public weights there is little to study yet. Marble’s API is the only way to run experiments at scale right now.

Content creators with a budget. Marble. The per-world price is known and low, and the outputs are ready for social and web use.

Editing, iteration and scale

Generation is only half of a production workflow. The other half is fixing what the model got wrong.

Marble ships with an editor. You can regenerate regions of a world, adjust composition, and with Marble 1.1 Plus extend the world outward with additional dynamic cubes, up to five per expansion (Radiance Fields). Iteration is cheap because each world is a discrete, bounded asset priced at 1,500 credits.

Atlas has no public editor as of September 3, 2026. The announcement shows results, not a workflow. Because Atlas conditions on reference images and camera paths, the natural way to iterate is to change the inputs: add a photo, move the path, re-render. That is a different loop from region editing, and it will suit some teams better than others. Robotics teams who re-render the same scene under new lighting and object layouts, as World Labs demonstrated (Spatial Insider), are the obvious winners.

On scale, Marble worlds are room to block sized and grow by cubes. Atlas has been shown reconstructing “two large environments” from phone video, and generating minute-long camera moves, which implies larger continuous spaces, but no dimensions have been published.

Quality and consistency

Marble 1.1’s release notes focus on visual quality: better lighting, fewer artefacts and improved coherence over 1.0 (Radiance Fields). Because the output is a static splat scene, consistency across viewpoints is guaranteed by construction: every angle is a render of the same geometry.

Atlas must maintain consistency during generation, frame by frame, for up to a minute. Autoregressive models tend to drift over long sequences, and World Labs’ preference study on camera-controlled generation is, in effect, a claim that Atlas drifts less than the alternatives. The 75 to 94 percent preference range is self-reported (AlphaSignal). Whether a one-minute Atlas clip is as stable as a Marble world rendered along the same path is the single most useful independent test nobody has run yet.

Hosting and viewing the results

Marble worlds can be shared from World Labs’ own viewer, embedded, or exported. Exported .spz files are typically a tenth the size of the equivalent .ply, which makes them practical to host on a CDN and render with Spark, World Labs’ open-source, MIT-licensed three.js renderer (GitHub). That is exactly how the splat viewer on this site works.

Atlas outputs “splat scenes that render on device” (Dealroom), so the same viewing stack should apply. The video outputs are ordinary video files. Nothing about Atlas requires new client-side technology, which is good news for anyone who has already built around splats.

Migration checklist: from Marble to Atlas

If you are building on Marble now and expect to adopt Atlas later, these habits keep the switch cheap:

1. Store inputs, not just outputs. Keep the original photos, prompts and any camera paths alongside each generated world. Atlas will want the same inputs plus poses.
2. Standardise on .spz. It is the compact splat format both models are expected to share, and it loads fastest in browsers.
3. Abstract the provider. Put the World API call behind an interface that takes an input type and returns an operation, so a new model identifier or endpoint is a one-line change. This site’s generator does exactly that.
4. Budget per world, then per second. Track cost per asset now; add a per-second line item for video when Atlas pricing appears.
5. Capture for reconstruction. Even for Marble, overlapping, well-lit photos produce better worlds. For Atlas they are the whole input.

Summary

Marble and Atlas are two stages of one roadmap. Marble is a shipping 3D world generator with a public API, an editor, known pricing and mature exports. Atlas is a broader model that adds camera-controlled 1440p video, reconstruction from a few photos and simulation, with self-reported results and no public access. Build on Marble today, capture your inputs as if Atlas were already here, and keep an eye on the Atlas API status. For how both compare with models from other labs, start at the comparison hub.

What changes when Atlas opens

Three things are likely, none confirmed:

1. Same platform. Because Atlas builds on Marble and World Labs already runs the World API, an Atlas model identifier on the existing generate endpoint is the simplest path.
2. New request fields. Camera paths, video inputs and reconstruction settings have no equivalent in today’s API and would need new parameters.
3. Different pricing. One-minute 1440p video costs far more compute than a static world. Expect per-second or per-frame pricing for video alongside per-world pricing for reconstruction.

This site is built for that transition. The image, text and video tools run on a provider abstraction: the request you make does not change when the backend switches from Marble to Atlas. If you want to know the day that happens, join the waitlist below, or start today with the Marble World API quickstart.