Today’s a big day for the team at Bezel as we release our public beta. You might be wondering why we created Bezel and how it all started. Well, here’s a story about sandcastles, Figma, and screens:

Project Sandcastle

It was a warm afternoon at Stinson Beach, California, when I heard a couple kids giggling in a circle not too far away. They were building a sandcastle together, each contributing their unique buckets of sand to a shared goal of creating something new. Their faces were glowing, not just from the sunlight, but from the pure joy of the moment. Something felt so human about it. It felt so natural.

Soon after, in the wake of COVID when such activities were no longer possible, I wondered: Why isn’t there an easy way for people to do something like this online? What if there was a way for people to still come together and design in a shared space?

With this in mind, I quickly drafted a document named Project Sandcastle: a technological exploration into joyful spatial collaboration.

Bezel started out as Project Sandcastle 🏖

Fast, Freeing, and Fun

A couple years ago, I was an engineer at Oculus building the design system for VR headsets. It was also when Facebook was really starting to adopt Figma as the primary way to design apps, and we wanted to bring it to the Oculus org as well.

While converting our design system files into Figma files and sharing them between teams, I realized that although Figma was better than existing alternatives, it wasn’t really solving the problem of designing for 3D. Beyond rendering the UI in 2D, there was still no easy way to view, let alone create, production designs for VR.

“How do I see this design in headset?” would be a frequent question asked by managers in meetings, usually left unresolved. Designers could either pair with a prototyper to build a heavy Unity app and sideload the APK into remote headsets, or they could work directly with an engineer and wait until the first implementation. Either way, it was a tedious weeklong process at best.

What happened to the glowing joy of building a sandcastle together? Why wasn’t there an easy way for us to design in 3D?

During this time, I had the fortune of working with Denys, one of the most creative people I’ve ever met, who empathized with these pain points as a prototyper and agreed to explore Project Sandcastle with me outside of work. When I also mentioned this to Cecilia, the designer leading the Oculus design system, she shared the same vision of a better future. The three of us eventually left Facebook to pursue this project full-time.

“I got it,” said Cecilia while brainstorming earlier this year. “This 3D design tool should be fast, freeing, and fun.” Indeed, these three words have been a north star for us, driving our product decisions over the past year. A tool not only fast in creating and sharing files, but also freeing your imagination, and even making it fun along the way. These three words aren’t typically associated with 3D design today.

If you look closely, you’ll find Cecilia 👀

A New Bezel

In tech, the term “bezel” refers to the outer frame around a device’s screen. It plays a humble yet important role, supporting the digital content that we interact with everyday. The more compelling the content, the more it fades away to bring focus to what matters in the moment.

At Bezel, we envision a future where content is embedded in reality by default. The question is no longer how narrow the bezel is, but rather how to best design for an infinite canvas. A canvas as vast as the beach.

Today our team has grown to eight people, passionate about bringing genuine collaboration to 3D design. We’ve been using Bezel internally to create Bezel itself, and our early partners have been using Bezel to speed up their workflow as well.

Though still in its early days, Bezel is now available for more teams like yours so you can easily design and prototype 3D experiences together. We believe in a future where creating something together feels as human and natural as building a sandcastle with your friends. Want to join us as an early adopter? Start today at bezel.it

— Julian Park, Co-founder & CEO