3D Rubik's Cube Solver — Scan & Solve
Scan your Rubik's cube with your camera or pick the colour of every sticker by hand, then watch a 3D animated cube walk you through the solution one move at a time.
- Choose how to enter your cube: "Scan With Camera" to read the stickers through your webcam or phone camera, or "Pick Colours" to click them in on the flat cube map.
- If scanning, hold each face up to the on-screen grid in the order shown and press Capture. The tool tells you exactly how to turn the cube between faces so every sticker lands in the right place.
- Check the flat cube map and fix any sticker the camera misread — a click paints it, and dragging paints a run of them.
- Press Solve Cube. If the colours cannot form a real cube, you get a plain-English explanation of what is wrong instead of a broken answer.
- Play the solution on the 3D cube. Step through it move by move, drag the cube to look at any side, change the speed, or copy the whole move list to follow along on your real cube.
All processing happens entirely in your browser. Your data never leaves your device.
Key Features
- Live camera scanning that reads all six faces, with clear instructions for how to turn the cube between each one
- Automatic colour matching that balances the readings so every colour ends up with exactly nine stickers
- Click-and-drag colour picker on a flat cube map for entering or correcting a cube by hand
- Fully 3D animated cube you can drag to spin, built with WebGL
- Step-by-step playback: play, pause, single-step forwards or backwards, jump to any move, and three animation speeds
- Solutions grouped into the six named stages of the beginner's method, each with a short explanation
- Plain-English validation that explains exactly why an impossible cube cannot be solved
- Random scramble generator for practice, plus one-click copying of the move list in standard notation
- Runs entirely in your browser — no camera frames, images, or cube states are ever uploaded
About 3D Rubik's Cube Solver
The Rubik's Cube is a 3x3x3 twisty puzzle invented by Hungarian architect Ernő Rubik in 1974. It has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 reachable positions, yet every single one of them can be solved in 20 moves or fewer — a result proved by computer search in 2010 and nicknamed "God's Number". What makes the puzzle hard for people is not the number of positions but the fact that fixing one piece tends to disturb another, so solutions have to be built in stages that protect the work already done.
A cube solver takes the position of all 54 stickers and returns a sequence of face turns written in standard Singmaster notation: U, D, L, R, F and B mean a quarter turn clockwise of the Up, Down, Left, Right, Front and Back face, a prime (R') means the same turn anticlockwise, and a 2 (R2) means a half turn. Because the notation describes faces rather than colours, the same solution works no matter which colour scheme your cube uses, as long as you keep holding it the way you scanned it.
ForgeKit's solver follows the layer-by-layer beginner's method rather than searching for the shortest possible answer, and it groups the result into the six named stages a person actually learns — bottom cross, bottom corners, middle layer, top cross, top corners, top edges. The solution is longer than an optimal 20-move one, but every stage is a step you can recognise, practise and eventually do from memory. Scanning, solving and animation all run inside your browser; no picture of your cube is ever uploaded.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. Camera scanning is optional. You can click every sticker in on the flat cube map, which is also the fastest way to correct a face the camera misread. If your browser has no camera or you decline access, the colour picker keeps working normally.
The tool names the face it wants next and describes exactly how to get there from the previous one — for example, "turn the cube left so the RIGHT face points at the camera, keeping the same face on top". Following those instructions keeps the sticker positions consistent, which is what makes the solution match your physical cube.
Switch to the Pick Colours tab and click the sticker that is wrong. Red and orange are the pair cameras confuse most often, especially in warm indoor lighting. Scanning in bright, even, natural light gives noticeably better results.
Because it uses the beginner's layer-by-layer method, the same one taught to people. An optimal solver can finish any cube in 20 moves or fewer, but those sequences are the output of a deep computer search and are impossible to follow or learn from. Each stage here is a step you can actually recognise and practise.
They are standard Singmaster notation. U, D, L, R, F and B each mean a quarter turn clockwise of that face as you look straight at it. A prime, like R', means a quarter turn anticlockwise, and a 2, like R2, means a half turn. Face names are relative to how you held the cube when you entered the colours, so do not rotate the whole cube while following the moves.
Almost always it is a typo in the colours rather than a broken cube — a mis-scanned sticker leaves you with ten of one colour and eight of another. The tool lists the specific problem it found. Real cubes can also be genuinely unsolvable if they have been pulled apart and reassembled at random, in which case a single corner may be twisted or two pieces swapped; those states need the cube taking apart again to fix.
Not at the moment. It is built specifically for the standard 3x3x3 cube, including the way it validates a scanned cube and the layer-by-layer method it uses to solve one.
No. The video stream is read straight from your browser into a canvas, sampled for colour, and discarded. No frames, images, or cube states leave your device, and nothing is stored between visits.