A building holds temperature, humidity and a decade of maintenance logs. It holds almost nothing about what happens inside it. We think that asymmetry is a design decision, not a technical limit.
Every interface we use asks us to carry context between places. You arrive somewhere and re-establish everything: what you were doing, what should be running, who else is involved. The space contributes nothing. It is furniture with wiring.
State without surveillance
The tempting version of a room with memory is a room that records. That version is easy to build and difficult to live in. The version we are working on keeps state at the level of intent — a task is open, a rehearsal is in progress, this surface is in use — and discards the evidence that produced it.
Memory is not a recording. It is a summary that has been allowed to forget.
Practically, that means short-lived buffers, aggressive decay, and a hard rule: any state a space keeps must be describable in a sentence the occupant would recognise. If it cannot be said aloud, it should not be stored.
The boring part
Most of the work is not perception at all. It is addressing: a way to name a corner, a surface, a moving object, and have every system agree on that name three months later. We spend more time on coordinate hygiene than on anything that would photograph well.
The prototype currently lives in one room. It is unglamorous and slightly uncanny. It also makes returning to a laptop feel like stepping back a decade, which is the only benchmark we trust so far.