pocket-figma

Pocket Figma is a viewer that lets you browse a real Figma design file on a Sony PSP or PS Vita, two handheld gaming consoles from the 2000s and 2010s. Rather than running Figma's actual software on the device, which would be far too demanding for such old hardware, the project takes a specific public Figma community file, a wireframe kit with thousands of design elements, and converts it ahead of time into a pyramid of small compressed image tiles. Those pre baked tiles are what the handheld actually loads and displays, panned smoothly using the analog stick or touch screen at 60 frames per second.

Because everything is prepared in advance, the device itself never needs to understand Figma's file format, load fonts, or connect to the internet. It only shows images that were already generated on a regular computer beforehand. On the PS Vita, the same layout and controls are reused, but sharper image tiles are chosen to take advantage of the Vita's higher resolution screen, so the experience matches the PSP version while looking crisper.

Navigation uses the PSP's analog nub, its shoulder buttons for zooming, and its face buttons for moving between pages, while the Vita additionally supports touch gestures like one finger panning and two finger pinch to zoom. Building the project involves a series of command line steps using the Bun JavaScript runtime, and it depends on specialized toolchains for both the PSP and Vita that get installed automatically into a shared cache. There are also separate commands for regenerating the compressed image tiles from the source design file, running the app in a desktop preview window, and producing the final installable files for real PSP or Vita hardware, which typically requires custom firmware to run outside of an emulator.

The specific Figma design file used is a wireframe kit created by an outside designer and shared under a Creative Commons license, and the project notes it renders images derived from that file rather than redistributing the original file itself. Pocket Figma is released under the MIT license and is described as an unofficial project with no affiliation to Figma.