Stand back from the desk and draw with your whole arm. The webcam sees your hand from across the room, the board keeps going past the edge of the monitor, and there is nothing to mount on a wall or plug into anything. Pinch thumb and index together to put the pen down; open the pinch to lift it.
Free · no hardware · nothing to install
The word "board" usually implies a thing you buy and mount. What makes this one a board is not the hardware — there is none — but the scale you work at, and the scale is set by how far back you stand rather than by what you own.
A mouse confines drawing to a hand-sized patch of desk. Everything about the movement — the wrist anchored, the elbow tucked, the forearm resting — is a consequence of the device rather than of drawing, and it is why lines made with a mouse tend to look careful rather than confident.
Step back from the camera and the same gesture covers the whole board. The arm does the long sweeps, the wrist does the detail, and the stroke lands where your fingertip was — which is how people have always drawn on surfaces bigger than a page.
A hand held out at arm's length shakes more than one resting on a desk. That is physics, not technique.
So a low-pass filter runs underneath at three strengths keyed to speed — light while you are idle, heavier while you drift, and almost off when you move fast, so a quick arm-length arc stays quick instead of dragging behind you.
Big shapes drawn from the shoulder are never square. Hold the pinch still at the end of one and it snaps — line, circle, ellipse, arc, triangle, rectangle or polygon.
If the fitter is not confident what you meant it leaves your stroke exactly as you drew it, which is the right default when the alternative is guessing at your intent.
There is a second, quieter difference that only shows up after a few minutes. Drawing at desk scale, your eyes are eighteen inches from the surface and you see the stroke you are making. Drawing at board scale you are far enough back to see the whole thing while you work on part of it, which is the reason people have always stepped away from big surfaces to check them. Here you never have to step away, because you were already standing there.
How far back you can stand depends on your camera and your lighting rather than on a number we could print. The practical test takes ten seconds: step back until the line stops following you, then come forward a pace. Facing the light rather than sitting in front of it buys more distance than anything else.
A physical board has a frame, and everything you draw is arranged around running out of it. Anyone who has filled a whiteboard knows the feeling: the last third of the thinking gets compressed into the corner because the surface decided how much room the idea was allowed. This one has no size — you did not choose one at the start and there is nothing to reach.
Nothing scrolls away and nothing is cleared to make room, which are the two ways a fixed surface quietly edits your thinking for you.
Pan with a three-finger pinch and move your hand. Zoom with thumb and middle, up or down. What is on screen is a window onto the board rather than the board itself, which means the thing you drew twenty minutes ago is still over there rather than scrolled away or cleared to make room.
The zoom is the part worth practising. Thumb and middle pinched, moved up or down — it takes about a minute to stop overshooting, and after that you stop thinking about the canvas size entirely, which is the whole point of not having one.
Sketch a whole system at arm's length, then zoom in and detail one corner of it at wrist scale. Same board, no export and reimport in between.
Extend your index finger alone and a star pointer follows it. Useful when the board is bigger than the space you are standing in and the thing you are talking about is across it.
No hardware on a wall, no calibration to a physical surface, no pen tethered to anything, and nothing to pack up afterwards. The board exists in the air in front of a camera you already own.
The awkward part of any physical board is the end of it. Somebody photographs it at an angle, the photo goes into a thread, and three days later nobody can read it. A board that lives in a browser tab does not have that problem, and it has an option a physical one never had.
A snapshot writes a full-resolution PNG. A recording captures up to sixty minutes as MP4, WebM where the browser needs it, and the timelapse export at 2×, 3× or 5× turns an hour of building into something short enough that people actually watch it.
The timelapse in particular changes what a board session is for. An hour of building compresses to a few minutes, and at 2×, 3× or 5× the structure of the thinking becomes visible in a way it never is live — you can watch where you hesitated and where you went back. That is a different artefact from a photograph of the finished board, and usually a more useful one.
That last one is the difference between a board and this. A physical board gets photographed at the end, once, flattened. This one can hand you the whole build — every stroke in the order it happened — which is usually the more useful artefact, because the order is the argument.
Two things it does not do, stated plainly. It is a single-drawer board: one person, one canvas, and two people cannot draw on it from two machines. And there is no built-in casting — it is a browser tab, so anything you already use to share a screen will share it, but nothing here broadcasts on its own.
There is also nothing kept between sessions. No account, no cloud, no project file — close the tab and the board is gone, which makes exporting a deliberate act rather than a formality. If a board is going to run for an hour, start the recorder at the beginning; a sixty-minute capture contains every state the board passed through, even the ones you painted over.
Everything runs in the page: the hand tracking is a self-hosted model reading twenty-one points about thirty times a second, and the camera feed never leaves your device. It is not uploaded, not recorded and not sent to a server, and no account system exists anywhere in the product — so there is nothing for a board to be attached to and nobody to attach it to. The one thing it does need is a connection to open, because it loads like a web page, and enough light for the camera to find your hand at whatever distance you have chosen to stand.
Still stuck? Open the canvas and try it — the thing answers faster than reading about it does.
Try it FreeThere is no size. The board is edgeless — you pan with a three-finger pinch and zoom with thumb and middle, so the drawing area is however much of it you want to use. Nothing is chosen at the start and nothing runs out.
No. This is a single-drawer board today — one person, one canvas. Two people cannot draw on the same surface from two machines, and that is a real limitation rather than a feature behind an upgrade.
It is a browser tab, so anything you already use to share a screen will share it. There is no casting or broadcast feature built in — what there is instead is a recorder, so you can capture the whole build and send the file rather than the meeting.
Both. There are two canvas modes, portrait and landscape, and you need a camera and a reasonably modern browser. A phone propped up at a distance works the same way a laptop does.
Completely — no account, no trial, no paywall, no in-app purchases. Exports carry a small getairva.com corner mark, on images and video alike, and there is no paid tier that removes it.
The board is already bigger than your monitor. The only thing deciding how much of it you use is how far back you are standing.