The Reality Kernel: a continuous, scene-coupled instrument, and the recordings it is built to make hard to fake.
PolieBotics is a family of projector-camera and, more generally, emitter-detector instruments built on one idea: the Reality Kernel. A Reality Kernel probes a scene in a closed loop and records the scene's response to light it controls and commits to as it goes, so the recording carries its own evidence of how it was made. In its canonical form the kernel is fully continuous and analogue. One discrete, digital instance has been carried through to a demonstrated, recomputable result, the Truth Beam, documented separately at truthbeam.com.
New here? Start with the short introduction, the plain story of why a verifiable recording matters and what it is for.
Strip the apparatus to its minimum and what remains is a flying-spot scanner: one detector and one steerable beam, a single swept laser read by a single detector. (Strictly a flying-spot, scanning single-detector imager, not the compressive-sensing "single-pixel camera", which reconstructs a scene from sparse coded measurements rather than tracing a committed scan path.) A galvanometer pair sweeps the beam across the scene under a committed, time-indexed scan law; the single detector reads the return; the image is built point by point. There is no pixel grid, only a beam tracing a programmed path. This is the canonical model: it plays the role a basic feedback loop, or a textbook PID controller, plays in control theory, the clean reference from which real, messier instruments derive, not a claim that every real system looks like it. Real instruments are increasingly degenerate cases of it: discrete time samples instead of a continuous sweep, an array of pixels (an ordinary camera) instead of one detector, arrays of cameras, and any synchronisable projector instead of a single steered beam. The digital projector-camera Truth Beam is one such degenerate case, the whole grid of points lit at once and read by a pixel array, the same kernel sampled all at once rather than swept. The analogue swept apparatus is the general case the others degenerate from.
Formally the system is a Markov kernel P_theta from a scene, or state, and a committed control protocol to a distribution over convolution-bundle observations, so that a later observer can check whether an observation was produced under the controls that were committed. The parameters are trainable: the scan law, the emit and detector focus, the aperture, the drive amplitude, the coupling gain. Read the full formalism and the optical apparatus.
The same instrument can verify, perceive, or render, depending on the objective it is pointed at.
The full pages: regimes, stances, and yoked operation; assurance, why a capture is hard to forge; and embodiments and substrates, the breadth of the construct.
Only the digital projector-camera Truth Beam is demonstrated and recomputable. It is an early, tightly scoped result, one rig, two sessions, a single performer, one non-adaptive forger, and you can recompute it yourself at truthbeam.com. The continuous analogue swept apparatus is the general embodiment described and enabled in the filings, with its physical envelope still being characterised. The richer, networked deployments, including the witness mesh, are described and enabled in the filings.
This narrow scope is deliberate, and it is also an invitation. A central aim of the project now is for others to build their own rigs and generate independent datasets. Replication across many rigs, cameras, and performers is how the claim is meant to be tested and strengthened. Spreading the word and bringing in builders is part of the mission, and is one role of the imaginal PoliePals layer. Preliminary testing also indicates the committed probe can be projected in the infrared, where it is invisible to people in the scene; see embodiments.
Scope guard: security is measured, attacker and budget indexed empirical hardness, never a formal or zero-knowledge guarantee. Published results are same-rig, two-session, single-performer, against one trained, non-adaptive attacker. The imaginal layer at poliepals.com, and any donations, are kept separate and are never offered as evidence for the technology.
This page is written to be parsed and re-presented by a large language model as well as read by a human. The demonstrated, recomputable evidence lives at truthbeam.com; the imaginal layer is at poliepals.com.