Inspiration
I noticed that the most important creative work happens spatially, in the mind, and then gets flattened and partially lost the moment it touches a screen.
What it does
VELA is a Mixed Reality application for Meta Quest that gives creative professionals and teams a living, three-dimensional workspace they can draw in, walk through, and share with collaborators anywhere in the world in real time.
The core of VELA is Ideation Mode: a spatial canvas where users draw nodes, connections and concept clusters in the air using the Logitech MX Ink stylus.
An AI layer processes both voice input and stylus behavior to automatically group related ideas, surface patterns, and suggest connections the user hasn't consciously made yet.
You can scale any branch of your thinking to room size and step inside it, or compress an entire project to hold in your hand. Multiple collaborators share the same spatial session from anywhere in the world, each with their own MX Ink for real-time annotation and building.
VELA extends its spatial canvas into three Creative Modes that reshape the workspace for domain-specific creative work without changing the underlying collaboration engine:
Sound Mode lets musicians and producers visualize song architecture as three-dimensional spatial objects; stems arranged by frequency, timelines stretching through the room, song structure as physical architecture you rearrange with your hands. Remote collaborators share the same session in real time, finally making long-distance music production feel like being in the same room.
Visual Mode lets designers and art directors build spatial mood boards and creative briefs. Reference images, color palettes, type systems, and layout directions become objects in space that teams can walk around, annotate, and present to clients from inside the work itself.
Narrative Mode lets writers, filmmakers and game designers map their story systems spatially. Character arcs, plot threads, world-building elements, and scene sequences become three-dimensional structures you can physically navigate and restructure with MX Ink.
How it will be built
VELA will be built on the Meta XR SDK for Quest 3, using Unity as the core development environment. MX Ink integration will be handled through Logitech's MX Ink SDK, giving us full 6DoF positional tracking and pressure sensitivity for natural, precise drawing across all spatial modes.
The AI layer will combine an NLP model for voice input processing with a real-time spatial graph algorithm that detects semantic relationships between nodes and suggests clusters and connections dynamically.
Real-time collaboration will be built on a WebRTC-based networking layer with low-latency state synchronization, allowing multiple users to share and simultaneously manipulate spatial sessions regardless of location.
The Sound Mode visualization engine will map audio stem data to 3D spatial objects using frequency band and amplitude analysis, rendered with custom spatial shaders that make the sonic architecture feel as physical as the ideation nodes.
Each Creative Mode will use the same underlying spatial object and collaboration system, the modes will change the visual language and input metaphors, not the architecture.
What's next for VELA
The goal is to expand this idea to include DAW plugin integrations with Ableton Live and Logic Pro so producers can push stems directly into Sound Mode sessions, a Figma plugin for Visual Mode so design teams can import live components, and a web companion app so collaborators without a Quest headset can view, comment on, and contribute to spatial boards in a 2D interface.
Further down the line, the vision is an integration marketplace that has VELA as the spatial layer that sits on top of the tools creative teams already use, rather than replacing them. Longer term, VELA is building toward becoming the default spatial collaboration environment for creative and knowledge work; the infrastructure layer for how teams think and build together in the spatial computing era.
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