Kubo: a brand for an iPhone app that turns anything you walk around into a 3D model

Kubo is an iPhone app. Walk once around a chair, a plant or a pair of sneakers, and about a minute later you have a 3D model to share, sell, place in a room or print. Its buyer is someone who collects, sells or makes things and already lists them on resale apps.

The brief, in a founder's words: "Buyers on resale apps have stopped trusting photos; our sellers need a homepage that shows a real thing becoming a 3D listing in a minute, not another gallery of renders."

Half Real set things on a studio sweep with physical cubes cut from their own material. Sunroom made film stills of a lived-in flat in low May sun. Pixel Pop shot die-cut card pixels on sunflower yellow. Toy Voxel drew everything as clean 3D voxels.

Ryan's note on the first two: "1 and 2 are cool." A second round merged them in one prompt and lost the idea, so the rule merges them instead: Sunroom's flat and light, Half Real's cubes, worn like the thing they are cut from. The key art is someone capturing a half-cube armchair, made at 4K with a flat grey phone screen so the real capture screen could be pinned in.

We drew 17 candidates, each one made from an earlier one, and set them on one sheet in the order they were made, at full size and at 64 pixels. Ryan narrowed it to 02 or 03, and we kept 03. It is traced as drawn, a 99.9% match to the drawing, with the four eye discs refit as true circles so they can move.

Then we made the letters ours: the counters of the b and the o became soft squares, a cube inside each. Of three colourways, purple, gerbera orange and cobalt, orange stayed. It is the only colour in the logo, and the letters are never orange.

It carries the key art with the live capture screen on her phone, the clip where the armchair's cubes fill back into leather, the capture screen itself, the posters and a bus shelter, the palette as cubes of real material, and the logo snapping together. A cube dissolve is the cut between cells. It's made for LinkedIn and X, so it loops.

Ryan scored it 8.5 out of 10, the best concept board to that day.

Eight screens carry the job: the Shelf, framing the thing, the capture, a second low ring, building, the model, selling, and placing or printing. Leaving the app doesn't stop it: a Live Activity on the Lock Screen and the Dynamic Island keep the count while the model builds.

Three rules hold throughout. One thing moves at a time, the object first and its label after. Exits run about 30% faster than entries. Every haptic has a twin you can see.

D1, Floor dial: a ring of 72 ticks lies on the floor round the chair, hidden by the chair where it should be.

D2, Instrument: a clean feed over a warm-black panel with the share covered, photos, time, light and a 360° tape in three rings.

D3, The object is the progress: a big number over the wall, a dotted seam where the cubes stop, the next cube filling in and one chip that says which side is next.

D3 went forward, because it puts the brand's one idea to work. Jev leaned the same way on the written descriptions, by a little: 0.44 against 0.39 and 0.37.

SF Pro runs the app at three weights, on a scale from 84 points for the capture number down to 11 for tags, with tabular figures on every number. Spacing runs on 8 points. Gabarito sets the posters and the board, and the name is only ever the wordmark.

Contrast is measured: ink on plaster 13.2 to 1, white on cobalt 6.6, ink on orange 5.2. White on orange is 2.9, so it is never used.

On the Shelf, each card shows its model's cubes in one corner. Starting a capture frames the thing in an outline that follows its own steps. Building has no spinner: the photo gives way to cubes, then to a smooth model. The model sits on its photo, so you can drag the seam and check one against the other.

Sell writes the listing from the capture, with the model as the first photo and the only cobalt button in the app. Print starts from a size, not a mesh. The states are drawn too, from the empty shelf to a capture that's going too fast.

A cube fills in: in three stepped frames the cell takes the photo's own cube, a haptic tick lands with a ring you can see, and 61 rolls to 62, only the changed digit. Then Building grows into the finished model on a spring, the chair holding its place in the photo all the way.

Two clips move the world. The armchair's cubes fill back into leather as the capture on her phone finishes, and cube gerberas open into real flowers, one head at a time.

Ryan picked the world and narrowed the logo to two. The worlds, the key art, the logo candidates, the photographs and the two clips started as generated images and video, then were chosen and finished by hand; the logo was traced. Every screen and product film is drawn in code from one tokens file, so the interface is real and renders at any size, and the board is built in code from the finished pieces.