The a16z Show · Sunday, September 13, 2026
Atlas represents a significant architectural shift from World Labs' previous product, Marble, which relied heavily on Gaussian splats. Unlike Marble, where video output was generated by rendering Gaussian scenes, Atlas is built to directly output beautiful 2D pixels and 3D models, breaking the dependency on Gaussian splats for image and video generation.
“So Marble could output videos, Marble could output 3D scenes, Marble could output meshes, but everything was kind of bottlenecking through a 3D Gaussian splat representation.”
“So Atlas, you know, was built fully from the ground up to both rethink the architecture, to make it more unified, more easy to scale, um, and to have that branch between 2D and 3D happen earlier, right?”
“So when we're generating 2D outputs or video outputs from Atlas, you're not just bottlenecking through a Gaussian splat scene anymore. The models directly giving you those beautiful 2D pixels.”