✦ The free Brain — how to use
Sculpt your notes
The whole idea in one line: type or drop in your notes, then shape the glowing graph with your bare hand — no mouse, no upload, nothing that leaves the page. Here is the workflow, step by step.
This guide covers the free Brain — the public app. Slides and decks live in the full edition, shared by invitation; see the full guide or compare editions.
✦The workflow
Open the app
Open the app, click Start camera, and allow it when the browser asks. On your first visit the app downloads its hand-tracking model (about 17 MB) — the status line at the bottom right says so while it works. Safari takes a little longer than Chrome or Edge.
Show your hand
Once tracking is live, your hand is the instrument. An open hand blooms the graph outward; a fist collapses it back to a seed. Hold up fingers to reshape it, and rotate your wrist to spin the whole constellation.
| Gesture | What happens |
|---|---|
| 🖐Open hand | blooms the graph outward |
| ✊Fist | collapses it to a seed |
| ☝️1 finger | star shape |
| ✌️2 fingers | clusters |
| 🤟3 fingers | mesh |
| 🖖4+ fingers | full bloom |
| ↻Rotate wrist | spins the graph |
Your notes
Click menu (top left) and paste your notes into the box — one topic per line, with a two-space indent for sub-notes. Write [[Other Topic]] anywhere on a line to link it to another topic. Press "Build graph from these notes" and watch it appear.
Your files
Still in the menu: 📂 Map a folder turns a folder's structure straight into the constellation. 🔗 Read .md notes reads Markdown files — Obsidian vaults welcome — and any [[links]] inside them become connections between nodes.
Files are read on this page and never uploaded anywhere. The notes the app generates from them land right in the notes box, ready for you to edit further.
Pinch to open
Nodes that came from a file wear a gold ring. Pinch thumb and index finger together on a ringed node and the file opens in a preview right on the page — images, PDFs, and text all show inline. Press Esc or click ✕ to close it.
✦If something's off
- Camera won't start — it needs an https address (this page qualifies) or your own 127.0.0.1 / localhost.
- Nothing happens at first — give the first load a moment; the hand model is still downloading, especially in Safari.
- Tracking looks shaky — keep your hand about an arm's length from the camera, in decent light.
- The graph side looks dim — that's on purpose, so the glow reads clearly; the Darkness slider tunes how far it goes.