Introducing an innovation space within the Blender project, where designers and developers can work together on challenging or future-facing projects, to keep Blender relevant in the years to come.

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

Software stability and reliability have become critical for individuals and companies. As a consequence, development efforts focus on those aspects, offering progressive improvements of existing functionality only when these are clear enhancements of what is already there.

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

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

A lab activity is a project that brings innovation to the Blender project, and contributes to Blender Foundation’s mission. The project should face some unknowns, but also be handled by a team or individual with sufficient domain knowledge to solve them. Lab activities are meant to be independent of Blender releases.

Lab activities are always public and visible on blender.org/lab. Here the ongoing projects are presented, sharing objectives, timeline and participants. Intermediate builds for testing and feedback will be available here as well.

To get started with this initiative, here are some projects that qualify, and that are listed:

• Beyond mouse and keyboard (touch and pen)
• Beyond mouse and keyboard (VR/XR)
• Volume rendering
• Light transport

Some more projects that could be added soon:

• USD Authoring
• AI and ML technologies, starting with a Blender MCP server

Lab activities can be grouped in two categories:

• Applied research, which is the main focus of the lab. Developing and eventually 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 offer an advisory role on how technology can be implemented in production software.

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

Special credit goes to Ton Roosendaal for advocating for this project since 2018. At the time the Blender project was not able to allocate resources to the initiative, but today, thanks to growing community and corporate support there starts to be a path for it. Future campaigns and partnerships will be crucial for the success of this project. You can make this happen by joining the Blender Development Fund at fund.blender.org.

Francesco Siddi
Blender Foundation