A drawing surface that never runs out of room. Pinch your thumb and index finger to draw, pinch three fingers together to slide the canvas along, and zoom out whenever you want to see everything you have made — using the webcam you already have, in a browser tab.
Free · no account · nothing to install
Needs a webcam and a modern browser — laptop or phone.
One line, drawn past a sheet of paper, a screen, a whiteboard and a mural wall — then the zoom-out.
An infinite canvas is a drawing surface with no fixed size. Instead of a page with four edges, you get a plane that keeps going in every direction, and your screen becomes a window you move over it. Need more room? You do not resize anything — you slide the window somewhere empty and keep drawing.
That one change removes the most common interruption in drawing: running out of space. A mind map can sprout another branch. A storyboard can add a panel to the right. A lesson can move on to fresh space instead of wiping the last diagram off the board.
In AirVA, every stroke is stored at a position on that plane rather than painted into a screen-sized image, so the drawing is independent of the window you happen to be looking through. Pan, and the strokes stay exactly where you put them; zoom, and they scale with the view.
An infinite canvas is only as good as the way you move around it. With a mouse that means scroll wheels and toolbars; here it means three hand shapes your webcam can tell apart.
Touch your thumb and index finger together and move. The line follows the pinch; open your fingers to lift the pen.
Bring your thumb, index and middle fingers together and move your hand. The whole canvas slides with it, so empty space is always one move away.
Join your thumb and middle finger, then move up or down to zoom in or out around what you are looking at.
Two more gestures round it out: extend just your index finger for a star pointer that points without drawing, and raise three fingers — index, middle and ring — to open the session menu, where Undo lives. The first time, AirVA calibrates to your hand: an open hand held for two seconds, then a pinch held for one, so the pen goes down when you mean it. All six gestures are on the gestures page, and the guide walks through a first session.
Anything that grows while you make it. These are the six that come up again and again — and they all rely on the same two moves: slide to new space, zoom out to see it together.
Start in the middle and branch outward. When a branch needs room, pan toward it; when you want the overview, zoom out.
Draw a panel, slide right, draw the next. The sequence reads left to right because that is how you built it.
Instead of erasing the last diagram, move on to clean space — and pan back when a student asks about it.
Record the view while you draw close up, then zoom out at the end. The video captures the whole journey from detail to picture.
A quote, a letter or a name written big across the canvas, one word per screen, then seen all at once.
Anything wider than a screen: a route, a history, a pattern that repeats until it is done.
Start tight on one small doodle. Keep drawing. At the end, zoom out — and the doodle turns out to be one piece of something much bigger. On an infinite canvas that reveal is not an editing trick; it is just the camera pulling back, and a video export records it as it happens.
It works because the viewer does not know the size of the picture until the very end. More ideas like it are on the video ideas page.
Plenty of good tools have an infinite canvas. They are built for different jobs, and the real difference is the input — what you hold, or do not hold, while you draw.
| Kind of tool | Built for | How you draw | How AirVA differs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Team whiteboards (Miro, tldraw, Excalidraw) | Planning, diagrams and sticky notes with other people, often in real time | Mouse, trackpad, touch or pen | AirVA has no shared boards or multiplayer — it is a drawing surface for one person and a camera. |
| Sketching apps with an infinite canvas (such as Concepts) | Precise sketching and design, mostly on tablets | Stylus or finger on glass | No tablet or stylus here; the line is looser and bigger, drawn in the air. |
| Classic paint programs | Editing an image of a fixed size | Mouse or pen | Their canvas ends at the image border. This one does not. |
| AirVA | Drawing with your hand on camera — lessons, videos, big expressive work | A pinch in mid-air, read by your webcam | Free, no account, nothing to install — and nothing to hold. |
If your work is a team workshop, use a team whiteboard. If it is you, a camera and an idea that needs room, this is the one built for that.
A few habits make a large canvas feel easy instead of endless.
It is easier to place a new idea when you can see where the old ones are.
Extend only your index finger for the star pointer — it shows a spot without leaving a mark.
A snapshot saves the current view as a full-resolution PNG, so pan and zoom until everything you want is in frame first.
Video export captures the view as it moves. A 2x, 3x or 5x timelapse turns a long session into a short clip.
Air drawing rewards large, confident strokes. Zoom in for small detail rather than drawing tiny.
Raise three fingers — index, middle and ring — for the session menu, where Undo lives.
What it does not do, so there are no surprises: there are no layers, no shared or cloud-saved boards, and no real-time collaboration. Zoom has limits in both directions — far enough out to see a large piece whole, far enough in for detail. And every export carries a small getairva.com mark in the corner, on images and video alike.
Still stuck? Open the canvas and try it — the thing answers faster than reading about it does.
Try it FreeAn infinite canvas is a drawing surface with no fixed size. Instead of a page with four edges, you get a plane that keeps going in every direction, and your screen is a window you move over it. When you need more room you pan to empty space; when you want the overview you zoom out.
Yes. AirVA is free, with no account, no trial and no paywall. It runs in your browser, so there is nothing to download or install.
Three pinches do it. Pinch your thumb and index finger and move to draw. Pinch your thumb, index and middle fingers together and move your hand to pan the canvas. Pinch your thumb and middle finger and move up or down to zoom in or out.
Yes — zoom out until everything you have drawn is in view, then zoom back in to keep working on a detail. Zoom has limits in both directions, but far enough out to see a large piece whole.
A snapshot saves the current view as a full-resolution PNG, so frame what you want first by panning and zooming. You can also record a video of the canvas as you move around it, including a 2x, 3x or 5x timelapse. Exports carry a small getairva.com mark in the corner, on images and video alike.
It is the same idea. Whiteboard apps build team features on top of it — sticky notes, templates and real-time collaboration. AirVA is a drawing canvas for one person, controlled by hand through a webcam; it has no shared boards or multiplayer.
Yes. AirVA works on laptops and phones with a camera, in landscape or portrait. A laptop gives your arm more room to move, which helps on a big drawing.
No. The webcam watches your hand, and a pinch of your thumb and index finger is the pen. Nothing to hold, charge or plug in.
No. Hand tracking runs inside your browser on your own device. Frames are processed there and discarded; nothing from the camera is uploaded.
Open the canvas, draw one line, then pinch three fingers and slide — there is always more room.