Assess a photo before generating a 3D world

Context & limitations

"Just dropped" is about ten months out. Marble went generally available on 12 November 2025 after a limited beta from roughly September, and Marble 1.1 — the version the video tells you to pick — shipped on 2 April 2026 alongside Marble 1.1 Plus. That's not a criticism, it's the opposite: you're not looking at a first-week demo. The rough edges people complained about in the original model are the ones 1.1 was built to fix, and 1.0 is still there to compare against.

The free tier is four worlds and a locked front door. It's 7,000 credits, and a Marble 1.1 world costs a flat 1,500 regardless of what you feed it, which is where the four comes from. Free also only takes a text prompt, a single image or a 360 panorama — multiple images, video and 3D layouts are Standard-tier inputs. And nothing leaves the site: splat export, 360 export and the low-resolution collider mesh unlock at Standard (around $20/month), and the high-quality textured mesh at Pro ($35). So on free, a world is a link you can share and walk around in, not a file you own. Worth knowing that the five-minute number is the world; the high-quality mesh export is closer to an hour.

Commercial rights sit on Pro, and that's the line worth saying out loud to anyone who posts things. World Labs grants commercial usage at the Pro tier, $35 a month — not on free, not on Standard. If a Marble world is background in a client deliverable or a monetised video rather than a thing you made for fun on a Sunday, that's the tier you need, and it's cheaper to know that now than after the edit.

Three to five metres is the real specification, and it explains everything else. Marble reconstructs from one viewpoint, so fidelity is highest near where the camera stood and falls off within a few metres; push past that and geometry thins out, gaps open, and the edges don't hit a wall so much as dissolve into mist. That is the shape of the technology rather than a defect. It's also exactly why the input photo decides the result: a shot with something close, something a few metres off and something far away hands the model three layers to rebuild, while a portrait of your mate against a wall hands it one. Skye works because Skye is layers all the way to the horizon.

And the part nobody posts: Marble 1.1 Plus worlds cannot be expanded. Expand is the tool for pushing a world's edges outward into unexplored space once you've walked to them — a Pro feature — and it's how you get past the three-metre problem honestly. But 1.1 Plus, the model sold on scale, auto-expands in a single pass instead, up to five "dynamic cubes" at 1,500 credits plus 300 for each extra cube, and a world it generates is finished the moment it lands. So the actual choice is bigger up front and frozen, or smaller and extendable — and you make it before you hit generate, because nothing afterwards changes it. That's the opposite of what "Plus, built for scale" sounds like, and it's the one thing here that costs real money to learn the hard way.