Client: None. Personal project — started at Config Makeathon 2026, ongoing since.
Scope: Concept + Product Design + Development + 3D
Timeline: Makeathon build, then ongoing
My role: Everything — design, code, 3D pipeline, deployment
A platform for building rooms out of your memories. You sketch the floor plan; it gives you back a place you can walk into.
The Problem
Every room you've ever loved still holds a memory, and no software has a shape for that. Photos flatten places; maps don't care. Motel Blues lets you rebuild the room — sketch a floor plan, generate it in 3D, fill it with objects, and embed the memories themselves (songs, photos, videos, links) inside the objects. Then walk back in — browser, VR, or AR.
Constraints
Born under makeathon time pressure, then held to production standards afterward — two different disciplines on the same codebase.
3D on the open web: it has to run in a browser tab, on a phone, without a loading bar long enough to kill the mood it exists to create.
One person maintaining a full stack.
The Approach
Decision 1: sketch-to-room instead of a 3D editor. The alternative was giving users a room-builder with furniture catalogs and camera controls. Rejected, because the audience is people with a memory, not people with 3D skills. You sketch a floor plan — the one interface everyone already knows from the back of an envelope — and the system does the dimensional work, including AI-generated 3D objects (Hunyuan3D) for things no catalog would have.
Decision 2: memories live inside objects, not in a sidebar. The alternative was attaching media to the room as a gallery. Rejected, because that's a photo album with extra steps. The song lives in the radio. The video lives where it happened. Spatial memory is the product's whole thesis; the information architecture had to agree with it.
Decision 3: rooms are shared like rooms, not like links. Public rooms have a room number. Private rooms have a 6-digit key. The alternative — standard share-URLs and permission dialogs — was rejected because checking into a motel is the metaphor, and metaphors that stop at the logo are decoration.
The Range Moment
The stack runs from Figma (Make, Sites, Weave, FigJam) through Cursor, Three.js, Supabase, WebXR, and Cloudflare — concept, interface, 3D pipeline, backend, and deployment in one head. When the 3D generation needed a different model, that was a product decision and an infrastructure decision made by the same person, the same evening.
The Outcome
Live at motelblues.com, with a free tier and a working AR path: an ongoing product, not a hackathon artifact. The Figma files are shared openly with the community.
