Spectre

Spectre is the Virtual Reality (VR) Composition. VR is its Habitat modality; each admitted virtual place is one distinct VRHabitat@1. That record binds an exact world or scene to a runtime capability snapshot, reference-space policy, comfort and accessibility policy, retention boundary, and visible exit. Spectre opens one bounded Encounter inside that Habitat and brings its participants back with an honest account of what happened.

An Avatar may be projected into the VR Habitat. When a participant meets the Lich through that Avatar, the bounded meeting is a Spectre Encounter; Avatar remains the separate Composition that owns presentation and projection membership. The name follows spectre as an appearance or apparition: what is seen may be compelling without becoming identity, physical truth, or authority.

Contract

Spectre owns the durable VR Habitat binding and epoch: exact world or scene references; requested, required, negotiated, missing, and revoked VR capabilities; admitted spatial context; reference space; and comfort, accessibility, retention, and exit policy. The source world, engine project, runtime, and device remain outside that record.

Each Encounter owns its participants, purpose, consent changes, focus, pause, recenter, interruption, exit, recovery chronology, significant semantic interactions, and terminal judgment. An OpenXR XrSession, game process, socket, device handle, or pose stream is volatile provider state, never the durable Habitat or Encounter.

Records and lifecycle

Spectre separates the admitted place, bounded meeting, volatile runtime, and final judgment. A headset session may disappear while the Habitat remains eligible for a later Encounter; many Encounters may occur in one Habitat without becoming one endless social world.

flowchart LR
    F["Foundry world/build reference"] --> H["VRHabitat@1"]
    C["Capabilities · reference space · comfort · exit"] --> H
    H --> E["SpectreEncounter@1"]
    P["Participants · purpose · consent"] --> E
    A["Avatar ProjectionBinding@1 · optional"] --> E
    R["Volatile runtime session facts"] --> E
    E --> T["Attributed terminal settlement"]
    T --> AS["Avatar settles its binding separately"]

Changing the world/build digest, required capability set, reference-space policy, comfort or accessibility policy, retention rule, or exit contract creates a new Habitat revision or epoch. A runtime restart alone does not rewrite the Habitat. Changing participants, purpose, consent scope, or the referenced Avatar binding creates a fresh Encounter admission or an explicit recovery boundary; history is never silently edited.

VR Habitat and Encounter

Spectre is not a generic home for every spatial, rendered, or game experience. A Habitat says where a VR meeting can occur and which local capabilities and safety policies govern it; an Encounter says who met there, for what bounded purpose, what semantically happened, and how they left. One Habitat may admit many separately identified Encounters without turning into one endless session.

This reusable application truth remains stable even while the first packaged use, hardware profile, and richer Patterns are still being discovered. Revision one deliberately promises no multiplayer, persistent social world, full-body embodiment, eye or face tracking, mixed-reality mapping, or production hardware profile.

Two admission paths keep Avatar optional without weakening the user's intended meeting:

• a generic Encounter admits the Habitat, participants, purpose, consent, and required capabilities without any Avatar projection;
• an Encounter with the Lich additionally requires one exact Avatar-owned ProjectionBinding@1 already admitted for that Habitat. Spectre references that binding and may report its attributed target result, but cannot create, revise, replace, or close it on Avatar's behalf.

Typed participant, Avatar, world, artifact, interaction, and receipt references may cross these seams. Spectre receives no ambient engine console, filesystem, raw tracking database, microphone, world mutation, or body authority.

Runtime state is evidence, not Encounter truth

OpenXR session lifecycle distinguishes readiness, visibility, input focus, stopping, pending loss, and exit. Those states describe what the runtime can render or accept, not whether a participant attended, perceived an event, consented, understood, or remembers it. Spectre may translate them into attributed semantic chronology such as runtime_ready, input_suspended, exit_requested, runtime_stopping, and runtime_lost; it does not store the provider handle as Encounter identity.

XR_SESSION_STATE_LOSS_PENDING or an equivalent provider loss opens an interruption boundary. The Encounter policy either settles interrupted or offers an explicit recovery attempt. Recovery enumerates capabilities again, rechecks consent and purpose, creates a fresh provider session epoch, and links it to the interruption; it never pretends that rendering, input, or presence continued invisibly. A runtime EXITING request ends the XR route and is not automatically restarted.

OpenXR reference spaces also differ materially. Habitat admission pins whether the experience is view-relative, seated/local, floor-relative, or room-scale; whether floor or stage bounds are required; how recenter and reference-space change are handled; which locomotion is allowed; and which downgrade or refusal follows when the runtime cannot provide the declared space. A runtime space and its bounds are volatile provider facts, not the durable Habitat itself.

Capability admission follows the same fail-closed split. Required capabilities refuse admission when absent; optional capabilities become an explicit downgrade. The Habitat records requested, granted, missing, and revoked facts rather than inferring hands, haptics, room bounds, eye or face tracking, passthrough, anchors, or body tracking from the word “VR.”

Participants, accessibility, privacy, and exit

An Encounter names its participant set and per-participant admission. Each participant may pause, recenter, leave, or revoke consent independently. Their departure removes their participation; the Encounter continues only when the remaining participants, declared purpose, consent rules, and comfort policy permit it. A policy-required participant leaving may instead settle the whole Encounter as safely exited or interrupted.

A headset profile is not silently imposed on every participant. Seated, standing, room-scale, captioned, controller-free, companion-screen, or audio-led routes are admitted only when the Habitat explicitly supports them. The Encounter records which modality each participant actually received. A flat or audio companion route may support access or observation, but it never claims tracked spatial presence, shared reference space, haptics, privacy, or embodiment equivalent to an immersive participant.

The visible exit and recovery contract must remain available in every admitted modality. “Safe exit” means Spectre followed the declared local pause, disclosure, handoff, and exit protocol and settled what it could observe. It is not a guarantee of physical safety, device behavior, comfort for every body, or an unseen external effect.

WebXR's privacy and feature model treats immersive capabilities and pose data as sensitive. Spectre therefore keeps semantic events and minimum capability facts by default. Raw head, hand, gaze, face, body, room-mesh, camera, microphone, device-identifier, and per-frame streams stay volatile inside the admitted engine/runtime or their separately governed owner. They are never mined to infer identity, attention, affect, intent, consent, physical co-location, or remembered experience.

Representative journey: meet the Lich in VR

1. The Magus admits one VRHabitat@1 from an exact VR world or scene, OpenXR runtime capability snapshot, requested and required features, reference-space policy, retention rule, comfort and accessibility policy, and visible exit. Missing optional hand, haptic, or room-scale support becomes an explicit downgrade; a missing required capability refuses the Habitat.
2. Avatar independently admits one ProjectionBinding@1 targeted at the Habitat. Spectre cannot create or revise the Avatar profile, Morphe, Persona, binding, or other simultaneous projections.
3. A participant enters that Habitat for one declared purpose and meets the Lich through that projection. Spectre opens a new SpectreEncounter@1 referencing the exact binding rather than resuming an ambient endless session. A declared caption or companion route records its actual non-immersive modality rather than pretending equivalent spatial presence.
4. Spectre records semantic VR events, focus loss, pause, recenter, reference-space change, participant consent change, interruption, and exit while high-rate pose and device state remain volatile inside the engine/runtime path.
5. The participant revokes one optional tracking capability, so Spectre removes or degrades that feature according to policy without treating the signal as identity or intent. If the remaining mode no longer satisfies the purpose or comfort policy, Spectre offers visible exit and settles safely rather than improvising an equivalent experience.
6. A later runtime loss creates an explicit interruption. Recovery requires fresh capability and consent admission and a linked provider session epoch; otherwise the Encounter settles interrupted. Avatar separately settles its projection binding from Spectre's attributed result, and neither Composition claims the other's records or authority.

First integration hypothesis

OpenXR 1.1 is the protocol baseline: a future adapter must enumerate the selected runtime and extensions rather than infer support from the standard. Godot is the first engine candidate. A standalone Quest 3 OpenXR application is the smallest first hardware hypothesis; WiVRn or Monado provide later Linux/FOSS-first routes, while SteamVR or a vendor runtime remains an optional compatibility profile rather than architecture law.

The minimum proving profile needs a stereoscopic view, head pose, one tested action/input profile, one explicit reference-space policy, visible exit, and runtime-loss handling. Hand, eye, body, face, passthrough, spatial anchors, haptics, and room bounds are optional capabilities and remain honestly absent when the selected runtime cannot supply them. High-rate head, hand, gaze, and device state stays inside the engine/runtime path; only admitted artifacts and semantic encounter events cross into durable LychD records.

The first fixture is synthetic and network-disabled: one Habitat admitting a seated Encounter, a separate bounded room-scale Encounter, and one declared companion-screen route; a static or head-and-hands Avatar; required-capability refusal; optional-capability downgrade; focus loss; recenter and reference-space change; one participant exit; consent revocation; visible exit request; abrupt runtime loss; explicit recovery with a new session epoch; and complete export/deletion. It proves the Habitat and Encounter contracts, not headset compatibility, comfort for every participant, content quality, multiplayer, physical safety, or delivery.

Related: Foundry World · Blockworld · Avatar · Vision · Audio · Composition Portfolio