Draw and annotate in mid-air with your hand while you face your class or your camera. No stylus to buy, no tablet to pass around, no software for anyone to install — a webcam and a browser tab.
Works on a laptop, a classroom PC or a phone.
Free · no account · works in seconds
Teaching online broke something small and important: the ability to draw while facing the people you are teaching.
Not a replacement for every board — a better fit for particular moments.
Sketch the triangle, the circuit or the flow while still looking at your class. The drawing and your face share the frame.
Point at what matters and circle it as you speak. Emphasis lands harder when it is drawn in the moment.
Export a timelapse of a worked example for revision, or for students who could not attend.
For computing and STEM classes, the tool is itself the lesson — hand tracking, landmarks and gesture recognition, running live.
Handing the gesture over to a student puts them physically in the lesson, which is hard to do through a shared screen.
A borrowed laptop in a different building works exactly the same, because there is nothing installed on it.
The first minute decides whether the lesson feels smooth.
You want room to move your arm without leaving the frame. Standing slightly back beats leaning in.
Light on your face and hands, not a bright window behind you. Backlight turns a hand into a silhouette and tracking suffers.
Hold up an open hand, then pinch. This measures your hand so the pen goes down when you mean it — hand sizes differ, and a generic threshold fits nobody exactly.
Practise once before the lesson. Five minutes of drawing shapes is enough to make it feel natural in front of a class.
Worth knowing before you plan a lesson around it.
Dense handwriting is harder in mid-air than on paper, because there is nothing to rest your hand against. Write large, use it for diagrams, arrows and emphasis, and keep long passages of text on slides where they belong.
It draws on a flat canvas — this is 2D drawing controlled with 3D movement, not modelling in space.
It needs a working camera and a reasonably lit room. In a room where the camera cannot see your hand clearly, it will tell you what is wrong rather than sit there failing silently, but no software can draw with a hand it cannot see.
Still stuck? Open the canvas and try it — the thing answers faster than reading about it does.
Try it FreeIt is a drawing surface you control with hand movements read by a webcam instead of a pen, mouse or touchscreen. You pinch to write, point to move, and use open-hand gestures for other actions, so you can annotate while standing back and facing your audience.
For collaborative planning, use one — they are excellent at that. The difference here is posture and equipment. Drawing with a trackpad means looking down at your hands, and a stylus means buying and charging hardware. Drawing in the air means you can keep facing the camera or the room while you write, with nothing to buy.
No. If you are sharing your screen they need nothing at all. If you want them to try it themselves, they open a web page — there is no account, no download and no cost.
It runs in the browser with no installation, which is usually the deciding factor on a managed machine. It needs permission to use the camera, granted once per browser, and a reasonably modern browser.
You can export what you draw as a video, including a sped-up timelapse, which is useful for revision material or for students who missed the session. Screen recording or your usual conferencing tool will capture the board along with your voice.
No. Hand tracking happens inside the browser on the machine you are using. Frames are processed and discarded locally, nothing is uploaded, and no account exists to attach them to — which matters when the camera is pointed at a classroom.
It is well suited to diagrams, arrows, shapes, underlining and emphasis. Sustained small handwriting is harder in mid-air than with a pen, because your arm is not braced. Many teachers write large, use it for the diagram and the emphasis, and keep dense text on slides.
Nothing to install, nothing for students to sign up for.