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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]>
119 lines
7.7 KiB
Markdown
119 lines
7.7 KiB
Markdown
# WAI Content Taxonomy — the bearings doc
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> Living reference for *what web-transported content benefits from WAI,
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> how, and which extension covers it.* Not normative; it's the map we
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> plan cargo classes against. Edit as classes ship.
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## 1. The reframe: a spectrum, not a list of media types
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Everything transported over the web sits on one axis:
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```
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captured reality ──► synthesizable ──► executable ──► symbolic
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(samples) (rendered from (it IS a (already
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a description) program) instructions)
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```
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**WAI's leverage is proportional to how much of the content the sink can
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reconstruct instead of receiving pre-rendered.** That's the whole map.
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The discipline it enforces: do *not* claim "everything becomes
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instructions" — a real photograph is irreducibly samples. Different
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position on the axis → different lever → different size of win.
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## 2. The four levers
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| # | Lever | What it does | Where it applies |
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|---|---|---|---|
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| 1 | **Codec dispatch** | name the SOTA royalty-free codec; sink has it or falls back | all media |
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| 2 | **Neural shared-prior** | ship conditioning, regenerate against a requirement-of-existence model | perceptual media a model can reconstruct |
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| 3 | **Instructions-at-the-sink** | ship the recipe / state / intent; the sink renders | anything whose payload is secretly a rendered result |
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| 4 | **Determinism + receipts** | replay/decode/mixdown-equivalence, content-addressing, JWP signatures, joules | **cross-cutting** — applies even to content that can't be reconstructed |
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Levers 1–2 are the **compression** story. Lever 3 is the **medium-shift**
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story (the Disney "price per byte → joules per experience" thesis).
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Lever 4 is the **trust-and-energy** story, and it rides on top of all of
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them.
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## 3. The taxonomy (with mechanism + coverage)
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Status: ✅ shipped · 🟡 partial/composable from shipped pieces · ⬜ white space.
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### A. Captured reality — irreducible samples (levers 1, 2, 4)
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| Content | Primary lever | Capability / extension | Status |
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|---|---|---|---|
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| Photographs / images | codec dispatch + neural | `wai.image.*` (PNG/JXL/AVIF/JPEG, neural family) | ✅ |
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| Recorded audio | codec dispatch + neural | `wai.audio.{flac,opus}`, `wai.neural.{dac,encodec32,…}` | ✅ |
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| Recorded / cinematographic video | codec dispatch + neural | `wai.video.av1*`, `wai.neural.{dcvc_rt,dcvc_fm}` | ✅ |
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| Live capture: conferencing, telephony, **radio**, broadcast | codec dispatch + receipts | core audio/video caps + JWP per object | 🟡 (transport out of scope; caps + receipts exist) |
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| Sensor / telemetry / IoT | content-addressing + receipts | `wai.text.zstd` + JWP (or a `wai.feed.*` class) | 🟡 |
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| Scientific captures: microscopy, medical imaging, LiDAR/point clouds, genomic | codec dispatch + content-addressing | core caps; point clouds → splat/volumetric path | 🟡 |
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| Biosignals (EEG/ECG) | content-addressing + receipts | `wai.text.zstd` + JWP | 🟡 |
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### B. Synthesizable media — shipped today as the render (lever 3)
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| Content | Primary lever | Capability / extension | Status |
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|---|---|---|---|
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| **Animation / CGI film** | instructions-at-sink | `wai.film.linear` (a sealed world + camera track + frame schedule, film-equivalence) | ✅ |
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| Motion graphics / titles / ads | instructions-at-sink | interactive-worlds / joule-ui | 🟡 |
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| Music as score / synthesis | instructions-at-sink | `wai.audio.score` (note events, deterministic synth, mixdown-equivalence) | ✅ |
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| Procedural / game audio, soundscapes | instructions-at-sink | spatial-audio (`wai.audio.scene`) | 🟡 Phase 1 |
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| Text-to-speech | neural prior | ship text + a voice prior (`wai.neural.*` speech) | 🟡 |
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| Data visualizations / charts | instructions-at-sink | ship data + spec (joule-ui) | 🟡 |
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| Diagrams, vector art, **fonts** | instructions-at-sink | the precedents that already won the web; envelope only | ✅ (precedent) |
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| **Maps / geospatial** | instructions-at-sink | `map` standard | ✅ (sibling) |
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### C. Interactive / executable — it IS a program (levers 3, 4)
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| Content | Primary lever | Capability / extension | Status |
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|---|---|---|---|
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| **Videogames / interactive worlds** | instructions + determinism + receipts | interactive-worlds (`wai.world.*`) | ✅ |
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| 3D scenes / models | content-addressed assets | `wai.mesh.glb` | ✅ |
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| Gaussian splats | content-addressed assets | `wai.splat.spz` | ✅ |
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| **AR / VR / XR** immersive scenes | instructions-at-sink | interactive-worlds + a sink pose/camera mode | 🟡 (substrate exists; XR sink mode unbuilt) |
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| **Volumetric / light-field / holographic / 6DoF video** | instructions-at-sink | `wai.splat.4d` (temporal Gaussian tracks, frame-state-equivalence) | ✅ |
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| **Avatars / digital humans** | instructions-at-sink | `wai.avatar.pose` (skeletal sim + animation ops, skins a `wai.mesh.glb`) | ✅ |
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| UIs / applications | instructions-at-sink + receipts | `joule-ui` standard | ✅ (sibling) |
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| Documents-as-programs (interactive/reactive) | instructions-at-sink | joule-ui / interactive-worlds | 🟡 |
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| Simulations / digital twins | instructions + determinism | interactive-worlds sim registrants; CAD/mathground lineage | 🟡 |
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### D. Structured / symbolic — already instructions (levers 1, 4)
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| Content | Primary lever | Capability / extension | Status |
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|---|---|---|---|
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| Text / markup / documents | codec + content-addressing | `wai.text.{zstd,xz}`; reading surface = `Access`/`Lumina` | ✅ |
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| Code / software / packages | content-addressing + receipts | `wai.text.zstd` + JWP | 🟡 |
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| Datasets / tabular / scientific data / knowledge graphs | content-addressing + receipts | `wai.text.*` + JWP; `JouleDB` lineage | 🟡 |
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| Notifications / messages / event-&-state feeds | instructions + receipts | `wai.feed.state` (broadcast profile, replay-equivalence) | ✅ |
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### The under-the-radar classes (flagged white space)
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| Content | Why it matters | Plan |
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|---|---|---|
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| **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`) |
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| **Haptics** | instruction streams to actuators; tiny payloads, pure recipe, deterministic | **Phase 2** (`wai.haptic.signal`) |
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| **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`) |
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| **Digital humans / avatars** | the highest-bandwidth capture today, the most reducible to rig + stream — "personal at broadcast scale" | **Phase 4** |
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| **Volumetric / light fields** | where "video" goes next; no clean envelope exists for it yet | **Phase 5** |
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| **Full-sensory / olfactory** | the holodeck endgame | on the axis; not scheduled |
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## 4. The one sentence to navigate by
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> **WAI carries whatever it can reconstruct, and verifies whatever it
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> carries.** Reconstruction (instructions-at-sink, neural priors) is the
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> compression story; verification (determinism, content-addressing,
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> receipts, joules) is the trust-and-energy story — and the second
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> applies even to the content that can't be reconstructed.
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## 5. Reading the map
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- The **biggest commercial wedges**: animation-film (a sealed
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camera-on-rails world) and live state-feeds.
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- The **cleanest technical analog** to what's already proven:
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object-based spatial audio (mixdown-equivalence is the audio
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counterpart of replay-equivalence).
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- The **cross-cutting win** that needs no reconstruction at all:
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content-addressing + JWP receipts + measured joules on *every* class,
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including raw captured reality.
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See `cargo-roadmap.md` for the phased build plan.
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