A scene-coupled feedback instrument, introduced from its canonical model, and the Markov-kernel formalism that describes it.
P.I.G.M.I.E. Filing 1 · Markov-Channel Apparatus · IPOI, filed 2026 · patent pendingThe canonical Reality Kernel is the minimal reference instrument. It has one steerable emitter, one detector, one controller, and one scene.
The emitter sends a single beam into the scene. The controller steers that beam along a committed, time-indexed scan law. The detector reads the returning response. The controller conditions later emission on the response already observed.
The record is built point by point as the beam traces its path. There is no pixel grid in the canonical model. There is only a beam on a programmed path. The canonical model is continuous and analogue: the sweep and the readout proceed without discrete framing.
The architecture is not exotic. The human eye is itself a flying-spot instrument: a roughly two-degree foveal cone of high resolution, swept across the scene by saccades and composited into apparent fullness. The difference is the record. The eye's scan path goes unrecorded; here the path is committed. Run the loop yourself: hold a laser and sweep it around a scene, following what draws your attention, learning as you go to light what is in front of you as revealingly as possible. That is the canonical instrument, embodied. The hand and the saccades are the galvanometers, the laser is the emitter, the eye is the photodetector, and the improving sweep is the trainable scan law. All that is missing is the committed record.
This model plays the role that the basic feedback loop, or the textbook PID controller, plays in control theory. It is the clean ideal case from which messier instruments derive. It is not a claim that every real instrument has one beam and one detector.
Real instruments may replace the continuous sweep with discrete samples. They may replace the single detector with a pixel array. They may use detector arrays. They may use any synchronisable projector instead of a single steered beam. They may add a reactor. These are degenerate or elaborated cases of the canonical model.
A Reality Kernel is a closed physical loop. Emission and detection occur concurrently. The instrument is always probing and always observing.
The controller does not merely replay a fixed illumination pattern. It uses the ongoing detector response as an input to later control. The emitted signal is therefore conditioned on the physical response of the scene.
This distinguishes the instrument from a plain projector and camera. A projector can illuminate a scene. A camera can record a scene. The Reality Kernel adds the control loop that binds emitted probes and observed returns into one coupled process.
The scene is part of the loop. It is not only an object being imaged. It is a physical channel through which control, emission, propagation, response, and detection interact.
Emission and observation proceed together in time. The joint, time-ordered record of what was emitted and what was observed, across a run, is the convolution bundle. It names the joint history of control, emission, and response. The name is taken from the linear case, where the observed return is exactly the emitted probe convolved with the response of the scene and any reactor; nonlinear and memory-bearing reactors generalise that relation, and the bundle records the emit and observe pair whatever the channel's form.
The bundle is committed together with a record of the protocol that was run and the bounds it was run within, so it can be audited afterward. This committed record of the protocol and its bounds is the protocol digest.
The convolution bundle is not merely an image. It is a record of the physical interaction that produced the image or measurement. A later evaluator can ask whether a recording is consistent with the controls, timing, and meter bounds under which it was produced.
This is a provenance claim about the physical interaction. It is not a claim about the semantic truth of the staged scene. If a real object, display, mask, or performance was present in the scene, the bundle concerns the light-in and light-out history of that interaction.
Formally, the Reality Kernel is a Markov kernel. A Markov kernel maps inputs to a distribution over possible outputs.
In the canonical case, the inputs are the scene and the committed control protocol. The output is a distribution over possible convolution bundles.
This formalism separates the apparatus from the channel it realises. The apparatus is the physical module. The kernel is the parameterised mapping induced by that module under its controls, hardware state, and measurement conditions.
The full notation is deferred to the formal section. At this stage the important point is simple. A Reality Kernel is not only a camera, not only a projector, and not only a scanner. It is a scene-coupled feedback channel with a recorded history of emitted probes and observed returns.
There is a lineage worth naming. A Markov kernel is the mathematical object of Shannon's noisy channel, and the closed loop is Wiener's. Communication theory took the channel and asked how much information can cross it. Control theory took the loop and asked how to regulate through it. The Reality Kernel takes the same two objects, closed into one, and asks a third question: how much evidence does the crossing leave? Communication optimises throughput. Control optimises stability. This optimises witnessability.
From here, the page mostly describes the research programme rather than demonstrated systems. The grounded parts are the original WO filing and the demonstrated digital Truth Beam: the Truth Beam is built and recomputable, and the foundational projector-camera apparatus is the subject of WO. The formal model, the reactor families, and the networked embodiments set out below are enabled descriptions, published in the PIGMIE filings as part of that research project. Of these, the foundational physical apparatus is the part that has been exercised in hardware so far, and the physical envelope is still being characterised.
A projector and camera on their own only see the world. Drop a physical medium into the light path, one with memory, nonlinearity, and manufacturing scars, and the output at any moment depends four ways at once: on what the controller chose to emit, on what the scene did to the light, on what the reactor did to the light, and on everything the reactor remembers. Filing 1 makes that four-way dependence the source of everything the device can do. Verification, because the reactor's response is empirically hard to clone under the declared attacker families. Sensing, because the scene's contribution is information-rich. Rendering, because the controller can steer the output toward a target. One committed record carries the whole braid.
A reactor is an optional physical medium added to the path. Its purpose is to make the channel empirically hard to reproduce under declared conditions.
A reactor may be a scattering plate, nonlinear film, phosphor screen, fibre-delay loop, biological tissue, or another physical medium with measurable response structure. Its value comes from memory (phosphor persistence, charge traps, thermal states), nonlinearity (saturation, bistability, chaotic mixing), manufacturing variation (grain structure, defects, wear patterns), or other physical behaviour that affects the observed bundle.
Hardness is not absolute. It is a measured property against a declared attacker family, budget, meter family, and time. It is expected to be re-measured as attackers improve.
A reactor is not required. A linear reactor is valid. An identity reactor is valid. In those cases the instrument remains a Reality Kernel, but physical hardness is not the main objective.
The one-dimensional bench realisation contains an open scene subsystem and a sealed reactor subsystem under a common controller. The scene subsystem contains a scene laser, a one-axis mirror, a scene, and a scene detector. The reactor subsystem contains a 405 nm ultraviolet source, tunable lenses, a sealed aluminium cup with fluorescent and scattering material, a green-pass filter, and a reactor detector.
The cup deserves a closer look, because it is the buildable heart of the bench anchor, and Filing 1's non-limiting example is vivid. Inside the opaque, reflective aluminium cup sits a shallow bed of mixed marbles: uranium-glass ("vaseline glass") beads, where permitted by applicable safety and regulatory requirements, as the primary fluorescent species, alongside clear and frosted glass marbles, mirror-finished marbles, and crumpled aluminium foil. Sweep the 405 nm near-UV beam across the bed and the uranium-glass glows green, with a characteristic persistence time, while the mirrors and foil scatter and reflect without fluorescing. The green-pass filter in front of the reactor detector passes the wavelength-shifted glow and rejects the violet excitation, so the detector reads a response dominated by fluorescence plus scattered light in the pass band. Europium-doped, terbium-doped, or manganese-doped fluorescent beads and stable phosphor beads may be substituted or combined, subject to the same safety, handling, and regulatory requirements.
The bed's exact internal arrangement, how the beads, mirrors, and foil happen to lie against one another, is the physical secret. It is a secret that cannot be photocopied; in the filing's measured terms, it is empirically hard to clone under the declared attacker families, not unclonable in the absolute. It is also renewable: shake the cup and the bed re-randomises, so a fixed scan program applied to the new state yields different but statistically related responses. A deliberate reconfiguration event is logged in the protocol digest, and any hardness or enrolment claim made afterward is tied to the resulting reactor state. This is an illustrative build described in the filing, not a product.
The two-dimensional apparatus generalises this structure. The scene loop contains an eye-safe infrared source, a collimator, a galvanometer pair, a scan lens, a scene, and a scene detector. The reactor loop contains a reactor source, a galvanometer pair, a tunable emitter lens, a reactor medium, a tunable detector lens, an aperture, and a reactor detector.
The signal A(t) denotes a feedback path from the reactor detector through a fixed conditioning chain to the scene or infrared source. It is a physical feedback signal used to condition later emission.
The canonical mode is closed-loop coupling to the external scene. A cascade coupling adds a forward, low-latency path from the scene detector to the reactor source. A parallel coupling omits that forward path and uses the A(t) path only. A scene-decoupled mode is PoliePuter operation, where the module is used as a self-contained physical computation channel. In this mode the loop is pointed at no external scene and used as a physical computer: the reactor's transform is the computation, for example an optical matrix multiply, so the same module that verifies, perceives, or renders can also compute.
The scan engine is the subsystem that steers and focuses the probe. In a typical optical realisation, two galvanometer mirrors steer the beam in X and Y. The scan law may be raster, Lissajous, spiral, or another declared path. Tunable lenses may follow a committed focus profile. Emitter focus and detector focus are controls, so the focal geometry is part of the recorded operation.
Filing 1 writes the kernel formally as P_theta, mapping a scene and a control history to a distribution over recorded bundles:
P_theta : S x U_{0:T} -> Dist(C_{0:T})Here S is the scene space. U_{0:T} is the control protocol over the interval from 0 to T. C_{0:T} is the space of convolution bundles recorded over that interval.
The parameter vector is theta = (theta_hw, theta_sw). The hardware parameters theta_hw include lens positions, gains, reactor state, mechanical configuration, and other physical settings. The software parameters theta_sw are the control and learned settings.
The instantaneous control is written u(t) = (s(t), e(t), g_det(t)). The term s(t) is the scan state. The term e(t) is the emission state, including intensity, wavelength, polarisation, and related source controls where present. The term g_det(t) is the detector gain or detector-side measurement setting.
Some hardware-associated parameters may be trainable. In the two-dimensional anchor, the trainable subset can include the scan law, emitter focus, detector focus, aperture, drive amplitude, and coupling gain.
The channel is not assumed to be memoryless. It is also not claimed to be exactly Markovian at the physical level. A declared mixing condition bounds the residual dependence on earlier history. Beyond a horizon L, the residual dependence stays below eps_mem, written nu_mix(u; L) ≤ eps_mem. Because the kernel conditions on the full committed control history, it is well-defined even though the underlying physics has memory, and the mixing condition is what licenses approximating it with a finite-horizon model. Physically, the channel mixes because the medium dissipates and relaxes, so the influence of an earlier emission decays over time; a channel that did not mix, such as a perfect lossless memory, would not admit this finite-horizon approximation. (Filing 1 defines nu_mix as a conditional mutual information - so the mixing bound and the information the record carries are measured in the same currency.)
Empirical hardness measures how difficult it is to reproduce a valid-looking convolution bundle under declared conditions. The declaration includes the attacker family, the available budget, the meter family, the latency bounds, and the evaluation threshold.
Hardness is a property of an instrument, a protocol, and an evaluation setting. It is not a universal property of the name Reality Kernel. A configuration without a reactor, or without a strong meter envelope, may have lower hardness.
A witness mesh is a deployment in which several Reality Kernel modules are linked by continuous, low-latency analogue couplings. The participating instruments exchange derived fast-loop signals over bounded-latency paths. Their joint records are evaluated together.
Temporal order in the analogue kernel is established by mutual analogue timestamping between participating instruments. This has no obligatory discrete or cryptographic component.
A discrepancy test compares a claimed recording against the declared protocol, meter envelope, latency budget, and threshold. The result is conditional on those declarations.
The Truth Beam is the verification objective family. It checks whether a recording is consistent with a real physical device, scene, and control protocol. It concerns the provenance of the physical interaction, not the semantic truth of the scene. One discrete digital instance is documented separately at truthbeam.com.
The Limager is the perception objective family. It covers active sensing, 3D sensing, and semantic analysis of physical responses.
The Reality Transform is the controllable rendering objective family. It uses the physical channel to drive projection, illumination, or son-et-lumiere style mappings constrained to the measured channel.
Yoked operation is not a fourth objective family. It is a modifier. In yoked operation, the device and the scene are driven toward a joint dynamical state.
The same kernel formalism covers digital and analogue embodiments.
A digital embodiment may use a synchronised projector and camera. In that case, many points are illuminated and read through an array rather than swept by one beam and one detector. This is a degenerate case of the canonical model.
An analogue embodiment may use continuous optical and radio-frequency paths. Probe and response are exchanged as physical signals. Timing is established by mutual analogue timestamping between participating instruments.
The analogue and continuous optical embodiments are described and enabled in the filings. The physical envelope is still being characterised.
The two tracks are run in parallel by design, because they fail differently. The digital embodiment is demonstrated and strong today, but it borrows its trust: the hash chain itself degrades only modestly under known quantum attacks, while the public time anchors it leans on (the beacon's BLS signatures, the ledger's ECDSA) rest on assumptions that large-scale quantum computation would break - and machine-assisted cryptanalysis may erode such margins faster than expected. The analogue embodiment is the inverse profile: its envelope still being characterised, but its ordering and hardness are meant to be generated by coupled physics - mutual analogue timestamping, physical reactors - rather than borrowed from mathematical assumptions, so it is not hostage to them. Built up alongside the digital track, it is intended as the pre-built fallback: if the cryptographic layer ever degrades catastrophically, a physically grounded verification fabric will already exist and be characterised, rather than being started on the day it is needed.
The two embodiments operate independently. They are intended to merge only at the optical layer.
truthbeam.com · the demonstrated digital instance.
Filing 1: Physical Markov-Channel Apparatus · the IPOI application (on IPFS).
WO 2025/046153 A2 · the foundational projector-camera apparatus, first filed 2023 and published as this PCT.