side quests
the pursuits around the lab — leap motion, a print magazine, niji, patchwork, midjourney tv, the hardware program, and the union square scanner.
the founder's quests
- 2010–2021leap motion · handed-offleap motion — holz and buckwald's twelve-year hand-tracking company: the ~$80 controller, orion vr tracking, the open-source project north star headset, two collapsed apple acquisitions, then the ~$30m sale to ultrahaptics (ultraleap) in 2019. holz stayed cto until ~august 2021. 'the right product at the wrong time' — and the spatial-computing agenda midjourney inherited.
- 2020–society for science · continuingsociety for science — holz joined the national leadership council in 2020 and is now a board of trustees member; midjourney sponsors regeneron isef's 'technology enhances the arts' award, and holz attended isef 2025. he is a 2006 isef alum — the circle closed.
the lab's quests
- 2023-03–midjourney magazine · continuingmidjourney magazine — a $4/mo print zine of top-rated community images plus interviews, announced the same day as v5. holz: 'we thought it would be fun, and the community agreed, so we did it.' an ai lab shipping ink on paper.
- 2022-11–niji・journey × spellbrush · activeniji・journey — the anime/2d model line and ios/android app co-built with spellbrush, the sf/tokyo yc-w18 studio behind waifu labs and arrowmancer (~30 people; cory li, ruwen liu, haitao mao). closed beta november 2022; niji 5, niji 6, niji v7 followed. the collaboration's terms are undisclosed.
- 2024-05–rooms · continuingrooms — private collaborative web spaces (for members past 100 images) mirrored to discord channels. the community's first home on midjourney's own property, a year before the web opened to everyone.
- 2024-12–patchwork · activepatchwork — the storytelling lab's multiplayer infinite canvas for worldbuilding, mixing llms and image models; research preview december 2024 under max kreminski. the world-model agenda's first public artifact.
- 2025-07–midjourney tv · activemidjourney tv — a 24/7 stream of top community-made videos at midjourney.tv and on youtube, plus personalized feeds. the v1 video model's built-in programming.
- 2024–2026the 'orb' hardware program · continuingthe hardware program — abbas hired december 2023; 'we're officially getting into hardware' august 2024; office-hours reporting described 3d data capture and a project nicknamed 'orb.' what it produced was not a consumer device but the medical scanner — whether 'orb' survived as a separate track is unconfirmed.
- 2026-06–midjourney medical and the scanner · activemidjourney medical — the 'secret hardware project' revealed june 17, 2026: the midjourney scanner, a water-immersion full-body ultrasound-ct on 40 butterfly network modules (~½mm tissue detail, one-minute scan goal), plus a 24/7 spa at 300 grant ave, union square — 23,000 sq ft, four floors, ten-year lease, opening target end-2027. butterfly's sec filing pegs the supply agreement at $74m over five years. roadmap claims — 50,000+ scanners by ~2031, 'avoid 30% of all deaths' — are company goals, not results.
- 2024–the holodeck / the sims · continuingthe holodeck — office-hours reporting describes a 3d world project (~60fps camera-motion rendering, separate from the video model) and the long-game 'sims' vision: 'the final creative medium,' where there's 'no hard distinction between creators and players.' unshipped as of september 2026.
- 2023-05the china episode · endedmidjourney china — the murky episode: a wechat post from a nanjing joint venture announced a qq-based beta and was deleted; april office-hours notes had mentioned qq expansion and channel admins reportedly confirmed a closed beta. whether an official qq beta persisted was never resolved in reporting.
the community's quests
- 2022–the recap writers · activethe recap ecosystem — no official office-hours transcripts exist, so the record lives in community writeups: nick st. pierre's relays, imagine weekly, 'enthusiastically midjourney,' and the linkedin/medium recap circuit. 'miss journey' — the recurring default female face in early models — is the community's own coinage.
- 2021–the moderator corps · continuingthe volunteer moderator corps — ~40 guides and moderators listed by handle on the 2022 about page, keeping order in what became the largest server discord ever hosted (~21m members). discord had to engineer past its own 1m-member cap to hold it.
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.