Three-Live Turns AI-Generated Three.js into Native 3D and AR

Picture this: you ask an AI assistant to build a 3D viewer for your online store, and it hands you a tidy block of Three.js code. On your desktop browser it looks great. Then you open it on an iPhone and the AR button does nothing, because iOS Safari does not ship WebXR. That gap between "works in the demo" and "works on the phone in your hand" is exactly what Three-Live sets out to close.

What Three-Live actually does

Three-Live is an open-source project from Google (Apache-2.0, currently in beta, and explicitly "not an officially supported Google product") that compiles live, AI-generated Three.js on-device and renders it natively: Google Filament and Scene Viewer on Android, Apple RealityKit and Quick Look on iOS, and WebGL2 plus WebXR on the web. Instead of exporting a static model and losing every animation, the runtime keeps your JavaScript animate() loops, custom state and plugins running inside the AR view.

A playground you can open right now

The project hosts two zero-install studios at google.github.io/three-live. The 3D and AR studio gives you a procedural Three.js editor with preset scenes (Quantum Core, Torus Knot, an XR Living Room), a PBR material inspector, camera and tone-mapping controls, and one-tap export to USDZ, GLB or a live AR session. The whole studio weighs under 61 KB gzipped with zero dependencies. A second spatial computing studio adds 6DoF WebXR, hand tracking, and a set of spatial and simulation plugins.

I loaded the Quantum Core preset in a desktop browser and spun it around; on a supported phone, that same scene drops straight into Scene Viewer or Quick Look with its animations intact, which is the part a plain .usdz export cannot do.

Version 1.3.0: built for AI coding agents

The latest release leans into the AI-first angle: a new npx three-live-cli launcher lets an AI coding agent (or you) run validate, render and sim commands without installing a Rust toolchain. It locates or downloads the right platform binary from GitHub Releases and caches it locally.

If you prototype 3D or AR experiences with an AI assistant, Three-Live is one of the more interesting pieces of plumbing to appear this year. The code lives at github.com/google/three-live, and we keep a Three-Live listing with the key facts.

Cover: Three-Live 3D and AR studio playground (google.github.io/three-live).