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The taxonomy's #1 commercial wedge (animation / CGI film) was the last 🟡 with the substrate already built. A film is a sealed wai.world.replay + a keyframed camera track + a frame schedule: ship the world that generates the imagery, not the pixels. The sink renders the frames at its own resolution/rate/quality — lever 3 (instructions-at-the-sink) for the synthesizable slice of "video". Whole films travel in ~1 KB. - film feature (reuses the world engine + Fx floor + blake3): the WFLM container (contract + embedded WWLD + camera track) and the deterministic reconstruct contract. Conformance = film-equivalence: per-frame BLAKE3(world_state_hash(frame_tick) || interpolated camera pose) is bit-identical on every machine. It composes the embedded world's replay-equivalence (inherited unchanged) with the camera track in the wai.det.fixed64 floor; the render (pixels) stays the sink's, exactly as the worlds renderer / audio-scene HRTF. - World engine gains one general primitive: collect_checkpoints_sampled / run_sampled_dispatch — read the state hash at an arbitrary frame cadence, independent of the contract's checkpoint cadence (a renderer samples the timeline at its own frame rate). Additive; world corpus still green. - FilmReceipt (per-frame Merkle leaves, the splat4d shape) + a wai_meter .wflm branch that brackets a real frame-reconstruction burst and emits MEASURED joules. - Registered (wai.film.linear, tiered Lossless — film-equivalence is exact); corpus film-conformance/ + wai_film_vectors gen|verify (dolly, two-shot, crane-up), wired into the four-platform conformance matrix. - Promoted to extensions/linear-film.md + SPEC §5 temporal row; taxonomy animation-film → ✅; README + CHANGELOG. Honest scope: the size win is for films GENERATED from a world (animation/CGI/motion-graphics); live-action capture is irreducible samples and stays wai.video.*. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
7.7 KiB
7.7 KiB
WAI Content Taxonomy — the bearings doc
Living reference for what web-transported content benefits from WAI, how, and which extension covers it. Not normative; it's the map we plan cargo classes against. Edit as classes ship.
1. The reframe: a spectrum, not a list of media types
Everything transported over the web sits on one axis:
captured reality ──► synthesizable ──► executable ──► symbolic
(samples) (rendered from (it IS a (already
a description) program) instructions)
WAI's leverage is proportional to how much of the content the sink can reconstruct instead of receiving pre-rendered. That's the whole map. The discipline it enforces: do not claim "everything becomes instructions" — a real photograph is irreducibly samples. Different position on the axis → different lever → different size of win.
2. The four levers
| # | Lever | What it does | Where it applies |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Codec dispatch | name the SOTA royalty-free codec; sink has it or falls back | all media |
| 2 | Neural shared-prior | ship conditioning, regenerate against a requirement-of-existence model | perceptual media a model can reconstruct |
| 3 | Instructions-at-the-sink | ship the recipe / state / intent; the sink renders | anything whose payload is secretly a rendered result |
| 4 | Determinism + receipts | replay/decode/mixdown-equivalence, content-addressing, JWP signatures, joules | cross-cutting — applies even to content that can't be reconstructed |
Levers 1–2 are the compression story. Lever 3 is the medium-shift story (the Disney "price per byte → joules per experience" thesis). Lever 4 is the trust-and-energy story, and it rides on top of all of them.
3. The taxonomy (with mechanism + coverage)
Status: ✅ shipped · 🟡 partial/composable from shipped pieces · ⬜ white space.
A. Captured reality — irreducible samples (levers 1, 2, 4)
| Content | Primary lever | Capability / extension | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Photographs / images | codec dispatch + neural | wai.image.* (PNG/JXL/AVIF/JPEG, neural family) |
✅ |
| Recorded audio | codec dispatch + neural | wai.audio.{flac,opus}, wai.neural.{dac,encodec32,…} |
✅ |
| Recorded / cinematographic video | codec dispatch + neural | wai.video.av1*, wai.neural.{dcvc_rt,dcvc_fm} |
✅ |
| Live capture: conferencing, telephony, radio, broadcast | codec dispatch + receipts | core audio/video caps + JWP per object | 🟡 (transport out of scope; caps + receipts exist) |
| Sensor / telemetry / IoT | content-addressing + receipts | wai.text.zstd + JWP (or a wai.feed.* class) |
🟡 |
| Scientific captures: microscopy, medical imaging, LiDAR/point clouds, genomic | codec dispatch + content-addressing | core caps; point clouds → splat/volumetric path | 🟡 |
| Biosignals (EEG/ECG) | content-addressing + receipts | wai.text.zstd + JWP |
🟡 |
B. Synthesizable media — shipped today as the render (lever 3)
| Content | Primary lever | Capability / extension | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Animation / CGI film | instructions-at-sink | wai.film.linear (a sealed world + camera track + frame schedule, film-equivalence) |
✅ |
| Motion graphics / titles / ads | instructions-at-sink | interactive-worlds / joule-ui | 🟡 |
| Music as score / synthesis | instructions-at-sink | wai.audio.score (note events, deterministic synth, mixdown-equivalence) |
✅ |
| Procedural / game audio, soundscapes | instructions-at-sink | spatial-audio (wai.audio.scene) |
🟡 Phase 1 |
| Text-to-speech | neural prior | ship text + a voice prior (wai.neural.* speech) |
🟡 |
| Data visualizations / charts | instructions-at-sink | ship data + spec (joule-ui) | 🟡 |
| Diagrams, vector art, fonts | instructions-at-sink | the precedents that already won the web; envelope only | ✅ (precedent) |
| Maps / geospatial | instructions-at-sink | map standard |
✅ (sibling) |
C. Interactive / executable — it IS a program (levers 3, 4)
| Content | Primary lever | Capability / extension | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Videogames / interactive worlds | instructions + determinism + receipts | interactive-worlds (wai.world.*) |
✅ |
| 3D scenes / models | content-addressed assets | wai.mesh.glb |
✅ |
| Gaussian splats | content-addressed assets | wai.splat.spz |
✅ |
| AR / VR / XR immersive scenes | instructions-at-sink | interactive-worlds + a sink pose/camera mode | 🟡 (substrate exists; XR sink mode unbuilt) |
| Volumetric / light-field / holographic / 6DoF video | instructions-at-sink | wai.splat.4d (temporal Gaussian tracks, frame-state-equivalence) |
✅ |
| Avatars / digital humans | instructions-at-sink | wai.avatar.pose (skeletal sim + animation ops, skins a wai.mesh.glb) |
✅ |
| UIs / applications | instructions-at-sink + receipts | joule-ui standard |
✅ (sibling) |
| Documents-as-programs (interactive/reactive) | instructions-at-sink | joule-ui / interactive-worlds | 🟡 |
| Simulations / digital twins | instructions + determinism | interactive-worlds sim registrants; CAD/mathground lineage | 🟡 |
D. Structured / symbolic — already instructions (levers 1, 4)
| Content | Primary lever | Capability / extension | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Text / markup / documents | codec + content-addressing | wai.text.{zstd,xz}; reading surface = Access/Lumina |
✅ |
| Code / software / packages | content-addressing + receipts | wai.text.zstd + JWP |
🟡 |
| Datasets / tabular / scientific data / knowledge graphs | content-addressing + receipts | wai.text.* + JWP; JouleDB lineage |
🟡 |
| Notifications / messages / event-&-state feeds | instructions + receipts | wai.feed.state (broadcast profile, replay-equivalence) |
✅ |
The under-the-radar classes (flagged white space)
| Content | Why it matters | Plan |
|---|---|---|
| Object-based / spatial audio | the exact audio analog of the video thesis: ship sound objects + a scene, render to the listener's speaker config — the cleanest technical fit | Phase 1 (wai.audio.scene) |
| Haptics | instruction streams to actuators; tiny payloads, pure recipe, deterministic | Phase 2 (wai.haptic.signal) |
| Live state-feeds | sports/events as state, not pixels — the multiplayer-games precedent applied to broadcast; a top commercial wedge | Phase 3 (broadcast profile of wai.world.live + wai.feed.state) |
| Digital humans / avatars | the highest-bandwidth capture today, the most reducible to rig + stream — "personal at broadcast scale" | Phase 4 |
| Volumetric / light fields | where "video" goes next; no clean envelope exists for it yet | Phase 5 |
| Full-sensory / olfactory | the holodeck endgame | on the axis; not scheduled |
4. The one sentence to navigate by
WAI carries whatever it can reconstruct, and verifies whatever it carries. Reconstruction (instructions-at-sink, neural priors) is the compression story; verification (determinism, content-addressing, receipts, joules) is the trust-and-energy story — and the second applies even to the content that can't be reconstructed.
5. Reading the map
- The biggest commercial wedges: animation-film (a sealed camera-on-rails world) and live state-feeds.
- The cleanest technical analog to what's already proven: object-based spatial audio (mixdown-equivalence is the audio counterpart of replay-equivalence).
- The cross-cutting win that needs no reconstruction at all: content-addressing + JWP receipts + measured joules on every class, including raw captured reality.
See cargo-roadmap.md for the phased build plan.