Try it live Description
Méliès sold toys at a train station for years, and nobody recognized him. Van Gogh sold almost none of his paintings. Li Shizhen finished his book, then waited more than ten years for someone willing to carve the printing blocks. Sun Wukong lay pinned under Five Elements Mountain for 500 years, waiting for someone to pass by. Now they live on an island in the clouds called Life Plaza, and the only rule at the gate is: trade a stretch of your days for a stretch of theirs. Most people who reach the gate are in a stretch of their own: thirty days before the graduate entrance exam, back-to-back night shifts, a child still awake at 4 a.m. Life Plaza is a gift for those still waiting.
The gatekeeper is a host who spent 20 years on late-night radio and now hands people pillows. No typing, just speak. She asks three things: what you do; where you were and what you were doing one recent night; and one object from that night. She writes you a life passport whose expiry line reads "When the millet is cooked": in the Tang dynasty, a man slept on someone else's pillow and lived a whole other life, only to wake before the innkeeper's millet was cooked. Everything you said follows you into every life.
Each life lends you its trade once, and the gift grows out of what you make with your own hands:
- Be a director: Méliès's glasshouse stage in Montreuil, 1897. Learn the stop trick on his top hat, bring the object you mentioned at the gate onto the stage and crank a trick film yourself, while he colors the poster in front of you.
- Be a painter: Van Gogh's bedroom in Arles, 1888, a world World Labs grew out of the painting The Bedroom. Press a sunflower and it turns chrome yellow; touch each object he names while reading his letter to Theo and it becomes thick paint; then pick a color for the chair he kept for a friend, and he paints it with your object on the seat and writes you a letter.
- Be a doctor: Li Shizhen's pharmacy in Qizhou, 1590, another world World Labs grew out of a painting. Cover the phone camera with a finger and the room's light pulses with your heartbeat; weigh herbs on his small steelyard by the classic roles of sovereign, minister, assistant and envoy, and he writes you a prescription for the heart.
- Be a pilgrim: at the foot of Five Elements Mountain, pull the grass from Sun Wukong's face and peel off the seal of six golden characters. When he calls "Farther, farther," you really walk away, and the mountain splits open. The ledger of trials is one short, and your own trial becomes the 81st.
After the four lives, a golden path leads you to a courtyard in the southwest of the plaza, where five small objects wait. A delivery rider, a night-shift nurse, a student preparing for the graduate exam, a new mother and an elderly regular at the morning market each walked into a life, and from each one's days and the life they walked through, the hosts made a one- or two-minute mini game on the spot (these five visitors are examples written from real days). The hosts are played by AI: they never change a word of what you said, and when they speak of themselves they draw on letters, writings and historical records. Everyone you meet is a character generated, rigged and animated with Tripo. There is nothing to install: it opens in a phone or computer browser, in Chinese and English. When you leave, you hold a film, a letter, a prescription and a travel pass, and your passport is full of entry stamps. She says: the millet is cooked. Go home and eat.
How Tripo was used
Everyone you meet on the plaza was made with Tripo.
- 13 characters: Méliès, Van Gogh, Li Shizhen, Sun Wukong, the guide at the gate, and 8 faces visitors can choose from. An image model first drew an A-pose character sheet; Tripo image-to-3D (v3.1) then generated each model, auto-rigged it with a 41-bone biped skeleton and retargeted up to 9 preset animations (walking, sitting, bowing, nodding, waving, laughing, jumping and more), packed into a GLB of about 1 MB per character. Passersby on the plaza are simplified versions of the same characters.
- 20 props and landmarks: Méliès's camera, projector and plaster moon, the pines and peaches on Five Elements Mountain, and the little monkeys Sun Wukong conjures from his hair.
