Getting started
Open the playground. It takes a moment to pull itself together, then it's yours.
- Come close and it notices you. Linger and it gets curious; move slowly and it follows your cursor. Leave the cursor still beside it for about 20 seconds and it reaches for it, then becomes it.
- Click near it to startle it.
- Drag it to stretch it. Pull far enough and it divides into two. Drag one into the other to bring them back together, or press R.
- Lab mode (L) turns off gravity: throw it, tap a blob to split it, shift-drag to pull a strand.
- On an Android phone (and other phones and tablets that need it) it runs lighter so it stays smooth: fewer pixels, no star glints or glow, no floor reflection, and each material is prepared the first time you pick it (a moment's pause). On the home page, tap Play in the corner to bring the live Mimikl out.
- Sound: browsers only allow sound after your first click or key, so with sound on it waits to gather itself until you click. Only the Mimikl you're looking at makes sounds: this page goes quiet when you switch away, and the Mac app keeps its idle sounds down while a browser is in front.
- The … button in the dock has everything without a button of its own: sleep, the mirror and bead props, and every key.
- Start over (the circular arrow, or Shift+R) resets the scene, or everything.
Keys
- 1–4
- Finishes: Mercury, Pearl, Holo, Obsidian
- 5–9
- The first physical materials
- M
- Mimic a shape (again for the next one)
- S
- Split into two
- R
- Bring them together
- Z
- Sleep / wake
- L
- Lab (zero gravity)
- E
- Environment and lighting
- V
- Sound on / off
- Space
- Pause
- Delete
- Remove the toy you're holding
- Shift+R
- Start over
- ?
- More (the menu with all of the above)
Materials
It can be made of 22 things. Four finishes sit in the dock; the rest are in the materials tray. Each behaves differently, not just looks different: ferrofluid grows spikes toward your cursor, honey is slow and syrupy with bubbles hanging inside, metallic slime drips, magma's crust cracks open when it moves, kinetic sand keeps the dents you poke into it until you knead it, and plasma arcs to whatever's near.
Plasma and Cloud are marked beta: they work, but their look is still being designed.
Teaching it shapes
Show it a picture: drop one anywhere on the page, paste a screenshot, or use the Shapes tray. It studies the silhouette and becomes it. It remembers four, on this browser only. Simple, bold silhouettes work best; photos with busy backgrounds don't.
Toys
- Make (the dock's shapes button) has ten: spiky ball, pumpkin, tentacle, mushroom, ghost, horn, a strange blob, a seashell, a vase and a skull. It notices new toys and goes to play with them.
- Copy it: one Mimikl absorbs the toy, studies it, turns into it and makes one of its own. Split in two, they do it together: one on each side, tentacles wrapped around it, a squeeze — then they merge back into one around it and copy it.
- Each toy has two sliders in plain words, a style (Literal, Playful, Absurd) and a finish. Scroll over a toy to reshape it directly.
- Mimikl, copy it: it goes to the toy, absorbs it, studies it and turns into it, then out come two: your toy and one of its own.
- Fuse two: carry one onto another and hold it there. Set the hybrid to Carve to cut one out of the other, or take it apart again.
- Pick toys up and throw them. Delete removes the one you hold; Clear all removes the lot.
Your own 3D models
Drop an STL, 3MF, OBJ, GLB or glTF file anywhere on the playground (or use Import 3D… in the Make tray). It's measured into a 48³ distance grid on your own computer, then it's a toy like the others: it rolls, gets pushed, and Mimikl can absorb it and become it. Use Stand it up if it arrives on its side: files disagree about which way is up.
Find its shapes asks Mimikl to explain your model with shapes it already knows (spheres, capsules, rounded boxes, and the like). It makes that version beside the original, says how close it got, and leaves the original untouched. The explained version can be resized, blended, made playful or absurd, and printed.
Not yet: USDZ, Draco- or meshopt-compressed glTF, and glTF that keeps its data in a separate .bin file. Textures aren't read; a model arrives in one color.
Exporting and printing
Any toy exports as GLB (3D apps, AR), STL (printing, in millimeters) or its recipe (rebuilds it exactly).
Exports are meshed as finely as the toy's finest part needs (a spiky ball's tips stay on), then simplified where it's smooth, so files stay small. Every export is checked first: closed, wound consistently, facing outward, in one piece, and thick enough to print (0.8 mm). The result is reported in plain words.
The Mac app In preview
Mimikl can live on your Mac's desktop, over your windows, with clicks passing straight through to whatever's underneath. Its menu-bar menu has four moods: Explore (it dodges your cursor; ⌥-drag picks it up), Hands-on (grab it, throw it, pull it apart, like the playground), Calm and Rest. It lands on the tops of your windows. Drop a picture on it to teach it a shape.
It works today, but it isn't available to download yet. Moving it between the browser and the desktop (the portal) is an idea, not a feature.
Capture In development
Mimikl's scanning side is an iPhone app that guides you around an object and a Mac engine that reconstructs it, then repairs and scales the result into a model you can export (USDZ, GLB, STL). Neither is publicly available yet.
- Matte, textured objects scan best. Shiny, transparent, very thin or plain-colored things are hard.
- Cover it from every side. Anything the camera never saw becomes a hole or a guess.
- Raw scans are often in pieces with holes; the processor repairs them where it can and flags them when it can't.
What it can't do yet
- It wears a copied toy at its own size, in one color and the nearest of its own materials; stripes and eyes don't carry over.
- Very thin parts (absurd spikes, a tightly curled tentacle tip) come out blunter when it copies them.
- Only four toys at a time. Toys don't travel between the browser and the Mac app.
- Scans can't be "filled in" with geometry yet; that's designed, not built.
- Glass reflects but doesn't bend light.
Privacy
Everything runs in your browser. There are no accounts, and fonts are served from this site. Google Analytics counts visits and which features get used (a material picked, a toy made, how long people play) — never names, pictures or files — and sets its own cookies to do it; add ?notme=1 to any page's address and this device isn't counted again.
Pictures you teach it and 3D files you import are processed on your computer and never uploaded. What it remembers (the
shapes it learned, your sound and environment choices; toys last only for the visit) is kept in your browser's local storage on this device; Start over → Reset
everything clears it.