World Labs Brings Marble Pro Free to Developers at SIGGRAPH 2026

World Labs, the spatial AI startup founded by Fei-Fei Li, is partnering with SensAI Hackademy to bring the Worlds in Action Hackathon to SIGGRAPH 2026. The event runs July 18-19 in Los Angeles, right before the conference kicks off, and every registered team gets free access to Marble Pro, World Labs' flagship 3D world generation product.

What is Marble, and why does it matter here?

World Labs launched Marble as its first commercial world model product, letting users turn text prompts, photos, videos, 3D layouts, or panoramas into editable, downloadable 3D environments. World models are AI systems that generate an internal representation of an environment, and can be used to predict future outcomes and plan actions. Think of it as the difference between a static image generator and a full spatial simulator you can walk around in.

Marble differs from competitors like Decart, Odyssey, and Google's Genie because it creates persistent, downloadable 3D environments rather than generating worlds on-the-fly as you explore. That persistence matters enormously for production use cases: you get a stable asset you can export, edit, and drop into a game engine or VFX pipeline, rather than a fleeting hallucinated scene.

Marble's subscription tiers break down as follows:

• Free: 4 generations from text, image, or panorama
• Standard ($20/month): 12 generations, multi-image/video input, advanced editing
• Pro ($35/month): 25 generations, scene expansion, commercial rights
• Max ($95/month): All features, 75 generations

The hackathon gives every team the Pro tier for free, which normally costs $35/month and includes commercial rights, making it the most useful tier for actually shipping something.

The SIGGRAPH play

The event takes place at the ASU California Center in Downtown Los Angeles on July 18-19, with support from The GAME School at ASU, bringing together tech artists, creators, XR/game developers, AI builders, and graphics programmers for hands-on prototyping, workflow-driven workshops, expert mentorship, demos, and awards.

SensAI Hackademy's stated motivation for the SIGGRAPH collaboration is to close the research-to-implementation gap. SIGGRAPH is the premier annual gathering for computer graphics researchers and practitioners, making it the ideal venue to test whether world models can actually survive contact with production-grade creative workflows.

Right before SIGGRAPH 2026, founders, researchers, engineers, VFX artists, filmmakers, game developers, and spatial computing pioneers will come together in Los Angeles to prototype the next generation of AI-native 3D experiences, including a dedicated SIGGRAPH workshop on Gaussian splats and world models. Gaussian splats, for context, are a 3D scene representation technique that encodes geometry and appearance as a cloud of semi-transparent blobs, enabling real-time rendering of photorealistic environments.

Proof of concept from the first edition

This is the second Worlds in Action hackathon. The first ran in San Francisco, and the numbers from that event are telling. Marble was adopted by 94% of all World Model hack teams at the SF edition, suggesting the tool is already practical enough for competitive prototyping under time pressure. World Labs, PICO XR, and ByteDance all sponsored tracks at the first event, and over 50 teams formed.

One standout project from the SF edition used the World Labs Marble API and a Unity kit to turn real rooms into fully aligned, playable game scenes, with walls, objects, and ceilings instantly transforming to match the physical hack space. That kind of real-to-virtual alignment is exactly the use case the LA edition is pushing further.

World Labs' bigger ambitions

The hackathon is a community play, but it sits inside a much larger strategic picture. World Labs has secured a $200 million investment from Autodesk as part of a larger $1 billion round, with backers including AMD, Emerson Collective, Fidelity, Nvidia, and others. The Autodesk check marks the largest startup investment in Autodesk's history.

The partnership between World Labs and Autodesk will see the two companies collaborating to explore how World Labs' models can work alongside Autodesk's tools, starting with a focus on entertainment use cases. That entertainment focus maps directly onto what the SIGGRAPH hackathon is targeting: gaming, VFX, and interactive experiences.

The company's founding team includes some of the most influential names in spatial AI: Ben Mildenhall, Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Fei-Fei Li herself. Li served as co-director of Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI and former chief scientist at Google Cloud, and her ImageNet dataset helped launch the deep learning revolution that powers today's generative AI boom.

What you can build, and who should show up

The hackathon is open to developers, tech artists, UGC creators, XR/game developers, AI builders, designers, graphics programmers, and anyone excited to build with Spatial Intelligence, World Models, GenAI, XR, and creative AI tools. Attendance is free; participants only need to cover travel and accommodation.

Target build categories include:

• Gaming: Background environments, ambient spaces, and level assets exportable to Unity or Unreal Engine
• VFX: Stable 3D scenes for camera-controlled compositing, bypassing the inconsistency of video generators
• AR/VR: Real-to-virtual spatial alignment and immersive interactive experiences
• Robotics simulation: Using Marble's generative worlds to accelerate robot training, testing, and real-to-sim transfer

The prize structure includes $2,000 in credits for winning teams, plus Marble Pro access for every participant. Pre-hack virtual workshops and Discord jams are already running for teams who want to get a head start on tooling before the in-person sprint.

If you are building anything in the spatial computing or 3D content creation stack, this is one of the few events where you get structured access to a frontier world model, mentorship from people actually shipping with it, and a room full of peers doing the same thing. Registration is open now on Luma, and spots are limited and rolling, so early applications have an advantage.