Introducing Blender Lab — Blender

Introducing an Innovation Space within the Blender Project, where designers and developers can work together on challenging or futuristic projects to keep Blender relevant for years to come.

Over the years, Blender has grown and matured into a powerful and complex software. With its unstoppable release cycles, a huge, highly demanding and diverse user community, natural technical debt and complex technical dependencies, shipping new features and general improvements requires greater effort and coordination.

Software stability and reliability have become important to individuals and companies. As a result, development efforts focus on those aspects, offering progressive improvements to existing functionality only when these are clear enhancements to pre-existing functions.

This makes it more challenging to do something new, think outside the box, experiment and break things.

To facilitate this essential aspect of product development, the Blender Foundation is setting up a new project: Blender Lab. This is the innovation space where designers, developers, and researchers work together on challenging and futuristic projects that will help Blender remain relevant in the years to come.

What is a laboratory activity?

Lab Activity is a project that drives innovation in the Blender project, and contributes to the mission of the Blender Foundation. The project must face some unknowns, but it must also be handled by a team or individual with sufficient domain knowledge to resolve them. Lab activities are independent of Blender releases.

What does it look like?

Lab activities are always public and visible on blender.org/labs. Here ongoing projects are presented, objectives, timeline and participants are shared. Intermediate builds will also be available here for testing and feedback.

First batch, more examples

To get started with this initiative, here are some of the projects that are eligible, and they are listed:

• Beyond mouse and keyboard (touch and pen)
• Beyond Mouse and Keyboard (VR/XR)
• volume rendering
• light transport

Some more projects that may be added soon:

• usd writing
• AI and ML technologies, starting with a Blender MCP server

Applied vs Academic Research

Lab activities can be divided into two categories:

• Applied research, which is the main focus of the laboratory. Developing and ultimately shipping groundbreaking solutions based on the latest research and knowledge in the field
• Academic Research. For example, this can be achieved by participating in projects organized by institutions such as universities and research centers, where Blender developers provide an advisory role on how the technology can be implemented in production software.

How do I make my project a lab project?

The goal is to start with a limited number of projects evaluated by the Blender Foundation in collaboration with key Blender contributors. During 2026, more guidelines will be defined and shared. If you are interested in submitting a proposal for a Labs project, you can do so by contacting the Blender Foundation and sharing a public document where you describe the project and make a compelling case for it. Adoption of a project depends on many factors, including availability of funding, relevance to the Blender mission, applicant experience, and more.

Conclusion and credits

Special credit goes to Ton Roosendaal for advocating this project since 2018. At the time the Blender project was not able to allocate resources to this initiative, but today, a path has begun to be made due to growing community and corporate support. Future campaigns and partnerships will be critical to the success of this project. You can do this by joining the Blender Development Fund at fund.blender.org.

francesco siddi
blender foundation