Today, we're excited to launch Aircada, a lightweight browser based 3D design studio for creating interactive 3D content on the web. We remember using three.js back in 2010 before we had smart phones. And now 15 years later it feels like 3D on the web is finally starting to see the light of day.
We use the beloved three.js under the hood - with WebGPU alongside the awesome node material system and TSL shader language.
1 minute demo video showing off what Aircada can do: https://youtu.be/hAJPnP93pfA
Hop right into a template: https://aircada.com/templates/bike-visualization
There are bugs! UX holes... A lack of onboarding. And mobile needs work. But we are long overdue to launch. It's free to try and your feedback is invaluable to us, so thank you in advance for anything you can throw our way.
(Condensed startup journey below - skip as needed!)
It's been a long one. I remember when covid hit in 2020, living in a hacker house in PA and sharing a bunkbed filled room with 8 other people from around the world. Riding my bike to work at the Intuit campus one day, we got the email saying WFH was a go.
As much as I loved the bunkbeds, and endless frontend work on form validation, the next day I drove back home to Colorado, and my older brother and I began our long-winded journey. The Hololens2 had just come out, and we thought it was the future.
Long story short, we bought one, started developing an industrial training solution with Unity and using Microsoft's cloud spatial anchors. The product worked! Mostly... Reliable AR persistence in factories was tough. Getting older industrial workers to adopt such new technology was even tougher.
We got our app into the Gemini Observatory in Chile where it won an award from the NSF (neat!), got accepted into the Long Beach startup accelerator, but everything was an uphill battle. Had we picked the wrong product and market? It seemed so.
And then almost all at once, Unity announced their new unfavorable pricing scheme, Microsoft announced it was retiring it's spatial anchors service, and there I was laying on the floor not knowing what to do with myself.
As web developers, one thing stood out during all of this. On our main home page, we had created a 3D industrial boiler illustration with arrows pointing at different parts, to show off what our system may look like in a factory. Creating this seemed simple but took more than a few days to ensure it was responsive, loaded quickly, and looked good.
That process should've taken a few hours. There were a few solutions out there, but they mostly all felt heavy, slow to load, hard to use, and certainly not the "canva" of 3D content creation. So we pivoted, and here we are.
Sheer persistence got us here, where it still feels like a starting line, so many years later. But we somehow still have more excitement than ever. Having a very smart older brother as your cofounder whom you know won't quit on you has been the biggest blessing through all of this.
Thanks for reading our long but heavily condensed diary. We invite you to give Aircada a spin and thank you again for any feedback you're able to provide. -Sean
ps - huge shoutout to the infamous @mrdoob, @sunag, @donmccurdy, @Mugen87, and all the other amazing contributors to three.js. Without you, we wouldn't be here.
