captured reality as file. the native format for photographs, satellite imagery, microscopy, medical scans, and any content that is a grid of color values
source format: PNG, WebP, JPEG — any raster image format
rendering
image file → decode → GPU texture upload → sampler → fragment shader
pixels files upload as GPU textures and sample through fragment shaders. mip-mapping for downscaling. trilinear filtering for smooth zooming. HDR where the display supports it. the robot renders a 100-megapixel satellite image and a 16x16 icon through the same pipeline
in the cybergraph
pixels is how the physical world enters the cybergraph. a photograph is evidence. a satellite image is data. a microscopy slide is an observation. when they become files, they become linkable, rankable, and permanent by axiom A3
types of pixels files: photographs, satellite images, electron microscopy, medical scans (MRI, CT, X-ray, PET), telescope images, aerial photography, specimen documentation, crime scene evidence, architectural renderings, artwork, screenshots, maps (raster tiles), thermal imagery, spectrometry outputs
a pixels file is often the most irreplaceable in the graph: it is the observation itself. the text file describes the experiment; the pixels file IS the specimen. the formula predicts the result; the pixels file IS the result
properties
- content-addressed — the particle of a pixels file is derived from its exact content. the same image anywhere in the world has the same CID. duplication is structurally impossible
- verifiable provenance — a pixels file linked by a neuron at a known block height is timestamped evidence. falsification requires breaking the hash
- annotatable — the cybergraph supports spatial annotation: a cyberlink can encode a bounding box or polygon reference within a pixels file, making region-level linking possible
- composable — pixels files compose inside component files. a medical viewer is a component that renders a sequence of pixels files (scan slices) as an interactive 3D volume
relation to other languages
pixels is the ground truth. vector draws what must be understood; pixels captures what is. video extends pixels into the time dimension. text annotates what pixels shows; pixels shows what text describes
see vector for resolution-independent imagery. see video for temporal sequences. see sound for the acoustic complement to visual evidence
discover all concepts
