The a16z Show · Sunday, September 13, 2026
Justin Johnson elaborated on the core functionalities of Atlas, highlighting its capabilities in generating novel worlds from prompts, reconstructing real-world spaces into 3D models, and simulating environments for applications like robotics. The reconstruction feature allows for detailed modeling using as few as one photograph.
“Generation is you want to generate new worlds that don't exist, right? Like I can start from a text prompt, I can start from an image prompt, then I can direct the camera and sort of fly through that world in whatever, and have the model generate a world that never existed before.”
“Um, the second major capability of Atlas is reconstruction, right? There, sometimes I don't want to generate a new world. Sometimes I have an existing space in the real world that I'd like to model and bring into virtual reality or the virtual world in some way. Right? So there what Atlas can do is is sparse reconstruction.”
“And the third thing we can do is simulation, right? And this is going after more robotics. Yeah. Um, well, both VFX and robotics. But there we want people to take an existing space, um, recreate that space in 3D, then simulate what a robot might, how a robot might behave in that space.”