Real World — Theo Real World

1. Open Real World. Pick Real World from the mode selector in the composer, or tap Real World in the Theo Chat sidebar. The mode sticks to the conversation.

2. Shoot it. For a room, stand in one spot and take a few photos as you turn, each overlapping the last (up to eight of one room) — or film one slow sweep of it, thirty seconds or less. For a person or an object, move the camera slowly all the way around it and take photos as you go (at least twelve), or film a slow 20-second walk-around — the best input of all. Every side you photograph is a side the capture will have; a side nobody photographed stays empty.

3. Drop your photos in — or the video. Add the photos all at once, or tap Add a video and pick one clip (MP4, MOV or WebM, up to 100 MB) — you can also drop it straight onto the chat. Theo reads what the photos are of — a room, a person, or an object — and, for a capture, shows its guess at each photo's angle on the board as a hint. You never have to label anything: the positions that matter are worked out from the pictures themselves when you send. With a video attached, the room or capture is built from the video's frames and any photos beside it are set aside — one source per build.

4. Send it. For a room, the quick room lands on the card in about a minute and you can walk into it right away; the full room, at real scale, replaces it a few minutes later. For a person or an object it is the quick capture then the full capture on the same schedule. You can keep chatting, close the tab, and come back.

Pick Room, attach one to eight photos of ONE room — taken from one spot, turning between shots so each overlaps the last — or one video of it (thirty seconds or less), and send. Theo Real World works out where each photo was taken, then builds the room: the walls and floor your photos showed, and everything they didn't — the corner behind you, the ceiling, the far side of the sofa — imagined to match them. The result is a room you stand inside and walk through.

• The quick room lands in about a minute — walk into it right away. It has no real-world scale yet, so it is walked in its own units.
• The full room replaces it a few minutes later at real scale: one step is one metre, the floor is where the floor was, and it comes with a 360° panorama of the whole room. The tier chip flips from "Quick room" to "Full room".
• The honesty line "Built from your photos · the rest is imagined" (or "your video") stays under the room, because it is true: the room is truest where the photos looked and imagined everywhere else. There is no dimensions line and nothing to correct — the scale is the engine's, not an estimate from one picture.
• Eight photos per room. Attach more of one room and the first eight are used; the card and Theo say the others were set aside.
• A whole home, room by room. Photos of several rooms? The studio sorts them into rooms — Theo proposes the grouping ("Room 1 · 3 photos", "Room 2 · 4 photos") and you drag a photo to another room, tap it for a menu, or drop it on New room. One send then builds every room (up to six a turn), one build each, on a single card with a room strip to hop between them. Each room is its own room to walk into; the strip is the doorway.
• Downloads: the room as a compact .spz splat file, and its 360° panorama as a .png.
• Without the room engine, a workspace builds a room from its first photo instead: the room is measured from that one picture (estimates you can correct on the card) and everything outside it is imagined, with a 360° preview first and the walkable space after. Theo's message says which path ran.

• Move the camera, not the subject. Turning an object in front of a still camera reads as one angle, not many — the background doesn't move with it, so the shots all come from the same place. You walk; the thing stays put.
• Overlap every shot. Each photo should share a good part of its view with the last one. That overlap is how the camera positions get solved.
• Read the coverage line. Under the capture the card says how many shots went in and which sides were seen — "captured from 9 shots · seen from the front only", or "the back wasn't seen". That is the side to shoot next time.
• Faint camera markers in the viewer show where each photo was taken from, so a thin side and a missing angle line up on screen.
• Twelve photos at least. Fewer stills of a person or an object come back as fragments, so Theo refuses before building and says what to shoot instead; a walk-around video has no such floor. All the way around, or a video, produces the whole thing.

• The quick tier lands first — a lighter version, enough to walk into a room or see which sides of a capture are missing. Explore it while the full one builds.
• The full tier is the same scene worked for several more minutes: a room at real scale with its panorama; a capture with finer detail, cleaner surfaces and truer colour. It replaces the quick one on the card when it finishes.
• A capture is faithful in both tiers — the far side of something nobody photographed stays empty, and the card says so. A room is imagined where the photos didn't look, in both tiers, and its card says that too.

Downloads: a room or capture saves as a compact .spz splat file that any splat viewer opens; a room also saves its 360° panorama.

• On the card, a room opens from where the photos were taken — drag to look around, scroll to move. A capture is orbited: drag to spin, scroll to zoom, pivoting on the subject from where the first photo was taken.
• Full screen, the same controls plus a Walk button. In walk mode you drag to look, use W A S D or the arrow keys to move, Q / E to rise and sink, and hold Shift to hurry — or right-drag, scroll, or use two fingers on a phone. The ground stays under you; a room is walked, not tumbled, and the walk stays inside the room the photos describe (the hint says so). Tap Walk again (or the turntable) to go back to orbiting exactly where you are.
• View in AR (beta) appears on phones and headsets whose browser supports it. It sets a miniature — about a metre across — on the floor an arm's length in front of you, so you can walk around it in your own room. A full room has real scale, so its miniature stands on its own floor and the hint says the scale ("1:8"); a capture has no real-world scale of its own, which is why it is shown as a model rather than life-size. Escape, or the same button, brings you back.

• A person should hold still, arms slightly away from the body, feet a little apart. You walk; they don't.
• An object should stay where it is. Leave it on the table and circle it — fill most of the frame and keep the whole thing in every shot.
• Turned it in your hand instead? Theo notices — the studio says so before you capture, and the thing comes back on its own, without the desk behind it, because the desk never moved. That works for something with pattern or shape to it; a small, plain or glossy object turned in the hand often can't be lined up into one shape at all, and then the card says so instead of showing you a blur. Setting it down on something with texture and walking around it is the fix.
• A room is shot from one spot: stand still and turn between photos so each overlaps the last, up to eight of one room — or film one slow, level sweep of it, thirty seconds or less. Shooting several rooms? Sort the photos into rooms in the studio and every room builds on one card. The room is truest where the photos looked, so shoot the parts you care about.
• Keep the light the same for every shot and skip the flash. Matte things capture best; glossy, mirrored, transparent or very thin things come out soft.
• Video beats photos for a capture. A slow, steady 20-second walk-around gives hundreds of overlapping frames — the single biggest thing you can do for a person or an object. A room takes a sweep of thirty seconds or less.

The studio lists the tips for whichever subject you picked, right under the board.

The quick room or quick capture usually lands in about a minute (a little longer when the engine is cold); the full room takes about five minutes more, the full capture a few, longer for a video with many frames. The card shows the step it's on and never claims something is finished before it is. If the full tier can't finish, the quick one stays on the card and a note under the viewer says so. And if the shots of a person or object can't be lined up at all — usually a small, plain thing turned in the hand — Theo refuses rather than shipping a blur, and the card names the one change that fixes it.

Credits are charged once per build — a quick tier on its own is cheap; quick + full together cost about as much as a Standard 3D render for a capture, and about twice that for a room, whose full tier is the bigger build. A failed full tier is never charged twice.

To build again, re-send the photos (for a capture, with more of whatever side the coverage line said was missing; for a room, with the part of it you wanted truer). A room or capture needs the pictures themselves, so the card doesn't offer a Regenerate button the way a 3D render does.

Theo Real World works from your photos of real places and things. It won't invent a model from a description or dress up a single reference picture — that's 3D mode, which builds an object from a prompt or from a few view-tagged photos. If you have the real thing in front of you, bring it here; if you have an idea, build it there.

It builds one room or captures one subject at a time, doesn't rig or animate the result, and produces a splat rather than a printable mesh. A capture can't fill in a side you never photographed — if the back looks thin, the coverage line will already have told you why. A room is the deliberate exception: there the rest is filled in, and the card says so rather than presenting it as a capture. Rooms don't join into one continuous house: a home is several rooms on one card, each its own room to walk into, and you hop between them with the strip rather than walking through a doorway.