A little over two years ago, the startup Astro HQ emerged with an app that could turn an iPad into a drawing slate for Photoshop and other desktop illustration tools. Now, Astro HQ is back with a new product that goes even further: it’s a small piece of hardware that turns an iPad into a full-on second display, no wires required.

Astro HQ’s new product is called the Luna Display, and it’s supposed to look like a small crystal with a USB-C port sticking out of it. (A Mini DisplayPort version will also be offered.) I was able to try out a prototype — without the colorful casing — and it’s already working, though not quite as perfectly as I’d hoped.

The USB-C dongle is a bit smaller than a dime. You plug it into your Mac, then launch the Luna app on both your Mac and a nearby iPad, and it’s up and running. As long as they’re both on the same Wi-Fi, it should just work. (You can also connect them with a Lightning cable, if Wi-Fi isn’t available.)

Astro HQ says the big advantage of plugging in the dongle is being able to trick the Mac into putting extra graphics resources toward the second display; other solutions for turning an iPad into a second display, like Duet, supposedly don’t get that advantage.

I did some quick testing of Luna and Duet (which only works wired) side by side and had pretty inconsistent results. At their worst, both Duet and Luna take a moment to refresh every time something on the iPad’s screen moves. At their best, both feel like clever but still somewhat hacked-together solutions that still aren’t as perfectly responsive as a real display.

For Luna, the strength of your Wi-Fi connection is going to make a big difference. In The Verge’s office, where dozens of people are connected to Wi-Fi, the congested connection meant that I had to wait through a pixelated refresh of the screen every time something moved — so I can’t imagine this will work great at a Starbucks. When I tried again at home, in the same room as my router, the situation was much better. There were still slight delays, but it was usable. I was able to watch a video, though the quality was compressed a good deal. Critically, drawing in Photoshop felt responsive, so Luna should work, like Astropad, for using desktop drawing tools on an iPad.

One thing in particular that worked better on Luna than on Duet was touch controls. In both cases, you’re still going to struggle with the fact that macOS simply isn’t built for touch and using a mouse with your fingertip is far from ideal. But I found Luna to be much better at recognizing gestures, like using two fingers to scroll, which made it a lot easier to use the iPad as a touchscreen Mac.
Matt Ronge, CEO of Astro HQ, says that the company “will be working heavily on improving our Wi-Fi support during the next six months leading up to delivery of our Kickstarter.” So the ultimate experience may be better than what I saw. Luna can also work while tethered over USB — Ronge says “it really screams” when wired — but I didn’t get a chance to test that. Ronge described the unit I tried as “a technology preview that’s a taste of what’s to come.”

Astro HQ also plans to build support for Luna into the existing Astropad app. The Astropad app does something very similar to Luna — it mirrors a Mac’s screen on an iPad — but it also includes a bunch of custom, easy-access controls that let artists quickly switch between tools. By building in Luna support, Astropad users should get an even more responsive experience when drawing.

Luna is Astro HQ’s first hardware product, and it’s launching the device over Kickstarter. Its campaign started yesterday and has already passed its $30,000 funding goal more than four times over. Luna units are being offered for $59 and are supposed to ship next May.

Ronge says that Astro HQ hired hardware engineers as it began planning Luna. To make sure the product can actually be built, the company made 200 prototypes (like the one I tested). “We’ve spent a lot of resources to make sure that Luna is something that will work and can be produced at scale,” Ronge says. He says that Astro HQ chose to launch through Kickstarter because “full-scale production is even more time consuming and expensive.” Plus, the crowdfunding campaign will let the company know if the product is actually something people want.