How WithLore Built ICARE: A Web-Native Interactive World with Marble and Spark 2.0

Overview

ICARE is a real-time web experience created by WithLore in collaboration with World Labs. Built in roughly two months by a three-person team, the project combines Marble-generated environments, Spark 2.0 streaming, custom Three.js gameplay systems, and AI-assisted production tools to create a large explorable dream world directly in the browser.

The experience follows Icarus through a series of surreal environments inspired by artists, inventors, and thinkers from history. Along the way, players restore lost tools to dreamers such as Leonardo da Vinci, Nikola Tesla, Katsushika Hokusai, Frida Kahlo, and others, exploring a narrative about creativity, technology, and human ingenuity.

Play ICARE in your browser here

Team

ICARE was developed by a small core team:

• Loic Picon — Art & Animation
• Nicholas Hildebrandt — Environment Art & UI Design
• Sunz Kim — Technical Art Direction & Engineering

Reimagining the Story of Icarus

ICARE begins with the myth of Icarus, but reinterprets it through the lens of innovation and creativity.

The traditional story is often understood as a warning against ambition. WithLore was interested in a more nuanced reading: progress requires courage, but it also requires intention, humility, and care.

The Challenge

WithLore set out to answer two questions:

• How large could a Marble-generated world become while maintaining artistic quality and coherence?
• How far could Spark 2.0 push real-time Gaussian splat rendering inside a browser-based interactive experience?

The team wanted to move beyond standalone splat scenes and build something closer to a game: a connected world with exploration, characters, interaction, narrative, and cinematic presentation.

Building Worlds with Marble

Marble became the foundation of the environment workflow.

Rather than treating concept art and environment production as separate stages, WithLore used Marble to move directly from visual exploration into navigable 3D spaces. Creative ideas could be evaluated spatially from the start, allowing the team to test environments in context rather than imagining how they might eventually feel in-engine.

Streaming Worlds with Spark 2.0

While Marble accelerated creation, Spark 2.0 made large-scale interactive deployment possible.

ICARE runs on a custom Three.js runtime built around Spark 2.0’s Gaussian splat rendering and streaming systems. Large environments are streamed dynamically into the browser using level-of-detail management rather than loaded all at once, allowing players to move through expansive worlds without overwhelming browser memory constraints.

Blending Splats and Traditional Rendering

ICARE combines streamed Gaussian splats with traditional Three.js rendering, including:

• Characters
• Props
• Terrain
• Gameplay systems
• Visual effects
• Interface elements

The result is an aesthetic that sits somewhere between a game environment, a painting, and a dream.

A Modern Creative Pipeline

ICARE was built using a broader production stack:

• Marble — Environment generation and iteration
• Spark 2.0 — Rendering and browser streaming
• ElevenLabs — Voice generation
• Suno — Music creation
• Codex and Claude Code — Engineering acceleration and implementation

The value of these tools wasn’t just speed—it was leverage.

Extending the Pipeline to Cinematics

One of the most unexpected outcomes of the project emerged during production of the launch video.

Rather than rebuilding scenes inside a separate cinematic workflow, WithLore created a custom Blender integration that allowed animation work to remain connected to the live Spark 2.0 runtime.

Results

For WithLore, the clearest outcome was speed at scale.

The studio estimates that producing a project of similar scope through its previous workflow would likely have required closer to a year of development. ICARE was completed in roughly two months by a primarily three-person team.

That acceleration translated into several concrete benefits:

• A large, explorable web-native world rather than a static technology demonstration
• Faster creative iteration through rapid environment generation and replacement
• Greater collaboration between artists, designers, and engineers
• Browser-based streaming of large Gaussian splat environments
• A reusable cinematic pipeline connected directly to the runtime experience
• Validation that small teams can build significantly larger interactive projects using modern world-generation and rendering tools

Looking Ahead

ICARE represents an early exploration of what web-native splat experiences can become.

For WithLore, the most exciting opportunity is not simply building bigger worlds. It is building worlds that can exist across formats—authored with the flexibility of filmmaking, rendered with the immediacy of games, distributed like websites, and experienced interactively by anyone with a browser.

ICARE offers a glimpse of that future: a generated world that is not just viewed, but explored.