Kinesis

Prism's Kinesis faculty turns admitted performance, prompts, constraints, audio cues, and existing clips into bounded, reusable motion. It may recover motion from finite video, generate or complete curves, retarget them to an exact rig, clean technical faults, align them to exact cues, or convert them into a declared portable projection. It does not thereby choreograph a scene, approve a performance, alter sound, import an engine controller, drive an avatar or robot, or publish anything.

This candidate study was reviewed on 2026-08-08. It records a proposed contract, FOSS tool base, license-gated model register, live-session boundary, and proving bake—not delivery, automatic fallback, or permission to capture, generate, retarget, play, or publish motion.

A pose is not an animation

The same visible movement crosses several owners without becoming one indistinct "motion" system:

Sight pose observations
→ Kinesis motion recovery or generation
→ Kinesis retargeted technical clip
→ Voidlight creative review and accepted animation set
→ Foundry engine import, controller, compression, and playtest

Sight owns estimates grounded to exact pixels and times. Form owns geometry, skeleton hierarchy, rest and bind pose, skin weights, morph targets, and rig revision. Kinesis owns structured change through time and its technical derivatives. Voidlight Motion owns choreography, direction, sequencing, and acceptance. Foundry owns target-engine behavior.

A direct video-to-motion worker may perform detection and pose estimation internally; it need not expose that private pipeline as separate Sight jobs. Its internal points become canonical VisualObservationSet@1 output only if the exact worker also satisfies Sight's provenance, coordinates, uncertainty, and validation contract. Likewise, a video model may return convincing moving pixels without returning one reusable joint, contact, or facial curve.

One finite job, exact operation

There is no useful OpenAI-compatible protocol for skeletons, clocks, constraints, retarget maps, contacts, or animation curves. The candidate KinesisJob@1 therefore names one explicit operation while its selected profile declares the source kinds, facets, controls, and limits it has proved:

compose, choreograph, direct, play, drive_avatar, and publish are deliberately absent. Those acts belong to a Composition or a separately authorized world effect, not a motion worker.

The request pins exact sources and temporal regions; operation and requested facets; source skeleton and target Form rig digests; calibration; units, axes, coordinate spaces, and time policies; constraints and anchors; purpose, classification, consent, retention, and likeness-use boundary; immutable model or tool preset; seed policy; deadline; compute or Portal budget; and idempotency key. Optional material never invents profile support.

KinesisJob@1 owns motion stages, candidates, technical validation, and result settlement. Creative adoption belongs to the consuming Composition. Each concrete service or tool execution uses Core's Designed ServiceJobAttempt@1 state, idempotency, cancellation, reconciliation, and indeterminate-effect law. An attempt remains contained until the same provider/executor job identity and working set settle; cancellation request is never proof that capture, inference, process, or remote effect stopped.

Decode, observe, solve, fit, generate, retarget, correct contacts, bake, validate, and export are progress stages rather than lifecycle states. Partial or uncertain output enters quarantined Reliquary custody. Only rehashed and validated artifacts are promoted. An uncertain paid, remote, or local tool effect is reconciled by its exact provider/executor job identity rather than blindly replayed.

Motion is a typed asset set

Successful producing or transforming operations return MotionAssetSet@1; validate returns an attributable MotionFindingSet@1 bound to the exact inputs and validation profile. A motion asset set is not a filename enum. It groups separately typed facets whose evidence and relations remain explicit:

Every facet declares an evidence class such as measured, recovered_estimate, generated, deterministic_transform, or manual. A monocular solve is not performer ground truth, a contact hypothesis is not physical proof, and a generated dance is not an observation. Missing hands or face channels never silently become zero motion.

glTF 2.0 is the default portable projection and may carry node translation, rotation, scale, and morph-weight animation. A GLB cannot by itself preserve Kinesis's contact meaning, root policy, loop intent, source-time map, uncertainty, consent, or provenance; the canonical manifest and receipt travel with it. BVH is legacy skeletal-motion interchange and must retain its exact hierarchy, channel order, Euler order, axes, scale, and source. VRM is a Form-owned avatar and rig projection; VRM 1.0 does not use embedded glTF animations. The separate VRM Animation format is a later Kinesis humanoid-motion projection. OpenUSD/UsdSkel is a later studio profile whose current TOST 1.0 license is pinned explicitly; a Blender round trip cannot be presumed to preserve every layer, reference, or variant semantic. FBX is lossy input or output compatibility only. Its original digest survives, Blender's FBX import and export contract are part of the profile, and the EULA-governed Autodesk SDK is neither canonical nor a dependency of the FOSS path.

Rig and clock law

Kinesis consumes one exact Form deformation facet. That Form-owned facet exposes stable joint ids and hierarchy; rest, bind, and inverse-bind transforms; local frames; handedness; up and forward axes; units and scale; root and pelvis semantics; degrees of freedom and joint limits; effectors and contact bones; mirror pairs; skin influences; and facial, expression, or viseme ontology where present.

RigMap@1 binds source and target skeleton digests, calibration pose, semantic mapping, orientation offsets, scale and translation rules, twist and helper distribution, IK chains and goals, unmapped joints, root and contact policy, facial mapping, and declared loss. Bone-name equality or humanoid=true is not compatibility. A changed target rig stales the retargeted clip; altering that rig creates a separate Form derivative.

A rational source timebase and exact timestamps survive every stage; 30 fps alone is insufficient. Variable-rate video, duplicate or dropped frames, audio drift, resampling, and gaps remain explicit. Rotations pin coordinate frame and representation plus Euler order where used; quaternions are normalized and checked for hemisphere continuity. Root motion is never silently stripped, baked into the pelvis, or reintroduced. Metric scale requires calibration or an admitted scale reference. Lip or facial timing points to the exact audio, transcript, or phoneme evidence and preserves its uncertainty.

Runtime and toolchain decision

Kinesis owns the job and artifact contracts, not a repository's Python API. Model repositories enter as pinned worker profiles; tools enter as finite contained tool workers. Sharing a process, container, Blender installation, or GPU with Form does not merge their semantics.

Blender runs as a rootless isolated subprocess with job-local scratch, fixed mounts, read-only scripts, no ambient home, host sockets, secrets, or network. Its pinned invocation includes --background, --disable-autoexec, --offline-mode, and --python-exit-code 1 plus one admitted read-only script. Blender's production guidance warns that offline mode cannot stop a third-party add-on from networking, so an OS network namespace is mandatory. Those flags do not disable malicious linked material, Geometry Nodes, or add-ons; admission rejects or explicitly allowlists them. Kinesis pins the Blender build, scripts, permitted add-ons, backend, threading, flags, and environment, then claims reproducible intent only where semantic validation agrees—not byte identity by default.

The first proving profile would use deterministic declared mapping, rest-pose orientation correction and FK, with an optional IK pass for named effectors. Foot lock acts only over declared or estimated contact intervals and reports the magnitude of every correction. Validate joint-limit violations and bone-length constancy except for declared scale channels; end-effector error; foot skate and floor penetration; root path and yaw; angular and discontinuity error; loop pose and velocity seam; maximum and RMS cleanup correction; output timebase; and projection validity. Exported and re-imported or decompressed projections are sampled against canonical curves under pinned maximum and RMS translation and angular tolerances; structural glTF validation alone cannot prove animation fidelity. Engine-native controllers, blending, target-engine root-motion extraction and use, and animation compression remain Foundry concerns.

First model profiles

The strict-FOSS first profile is the tool path above: admitted or authored motion, contained Blender transforms, portable GLB plus manifest, independent validation, and optional Rhubarb mouth cues. The strongest current learned candidates use custom open-model weight licenses, so they are operator-eligible profiles rather than the strict-FOSS default:

ARDY is a promising later interactive text-and-constraint profile, but its current CUDA path and gated Llama 3 text encoder make it a poor Core v1 dependency. Its code is Apache-2.0 and weights use the NVIDIA Open Model License, so the whole profile is not strict OSI-FOSS. MotionBricks is a later real-time interactive motion-synthesis and smart-primitives candidate with the same Apache-2.0 code and NVIDIA Open Model weight distinction. FreeMoCap is a useful AGPL specialist capture connector rather than the default Kinesis runtime.

No current music-to-dance or speech-to-whole-body model closes a sufficiently mature, permissive, dependency-complete default. EDGE and DiffSHEG remain research challengers. MoMask, MDM, MotionGPT, UniTalker, AnyTop, GEM-SMPL/GENMO, GVHMR, WHAM, and similar demonstrations may have permissive-looking repository code while depending on SMPL, SMPL-X, MANO, FLAME, AMASS, HumanML3D, BEAT, AIST++, Mixamo, Truebones, gated weights, or non-commercial data. Code, weights, body model, datasets, dependencies, and output-use terms all close independently before a profile can enter. A wrapper or converted checkpoint repairs none of them.

Until a champion closes that gate, music-conditioned work composes exact Riffmaw MusicCueMap@1 cues, authored or generated clips, Kimodo constraints where eligible, and declared Kinesis editing. Riffmaw still owns the music and Voidlight still decides the visible response; picture-bound sound and the final audiovisual relation remain with Broadcast.

Live motion comes later

A camera, tracking endpoint, instrument, or microphone is not an infinite KinesisJob. The later LiveKinesisSession@1 consumes exact upstream epochs from LiveSightSession@1, Riffmaw MusicalPerformanceSession@1 and ClockDomainMap@1, or a separately armed mocap transport. It inherits no camera, microphone, MIDI, avatar, robot, or world-effect authority.

The session pins participants; purpose and consent scopes; exact upstream session or admitted transport references and epochs; calibration and target-rig revisions; requested channels; clock maps and uncertainty; armed window; latency, cardinality, compute and cost bounds; bounded queue; sampling, resampling, reorder, and drop policy; consumers; retention; and output-segment policy. Every output binds the motion epoch, source cursor, target-rig digest, and deadline so consumers can reject stale results. Calibration, sender, target-rig, or unproved reconnect changes rotate the motion epoch. When an upstream source cannot pause, sampling and drops emit exact gaps and watermarks rather than hidden latency or invented motion. Disconnect retains acknowledged segments; only proved transport continuity may resume the same epoch, otherwise a newly armed forward session is required.

VMC over OSC is a later admitted motion-transport or output-projection profile, not Core law. Its first profile allowlists motion messages and rejects file paths, configuration, MIDI/control, and passthrough messages unless separately authorized. Kinesis may consume an admitted source transport or create the projection artifact; it does not open or send to a target avatar endpoint. A separately authorized Foundry or avatar adapter owns that effect. OSC and VMC provide neither application authentication nor guaranteed reliable delivery. A profile binds an admitted sender and network zone, allowlists message addresses, records receive time, reorder and drop facts, and rotates the epoch whenever sender or clock continuity cannot be proved. GStreamer may preserve media clocks, PTS, gaps, reorders, and drops; its core is LGPL-2.1-or-later while plug-in and codec licenses remain profile-specific. It is media substrate rather than a Kinesis runtime. Checkpoints retain configuration, cursors, exact segment references, and gaps—not sockets, device handles, tensors, or unbounded history. Stopping Kinesis proves neither that upstream capture stopped nor that a downstream avatar stopped moving.

Privacy, rights, and the proving bake

Body proportions, gait, hands, face curves, voice-conditioned facial motion, and even skeleton-only derivatives may identify or reveal a performer. Their classification and purpose follow every derivative after pixels or sound are discarded. Admission distinguishes capture, realtime analysis, persistence, inference, Portal egress, retargeting or likeness use, personalization or training, and publication. Consent for one is not consent for the others.

Face or gait recognition, cross-session re-identification, demographic, emotion, health, injury, or intention inference is outside Kinesis. Source-side privacy masking remains capture or Sight law; Kinesis cannot request an unmasked fallback. Revocation stops future admitted processing but cannot claim that already exported copies disappeared. A generated or recovered clip carries no authority to move an avatar, game entity, robot, vehicle, or physical effector.

Every receipt pins request and idempotency digest; input, intermediate, output, skeleton, rig, and retarget-map digests; model code, weights, body-model, dataset, dependency, and output-use licenses; runtime, container, Blender build, scripts, add-ons and flags; hardware, dtype, seed, and resource peaks; axes, units, coordinate and clock maps; root, contact, IK, gap, filter, resample, and projection policies; before/after metrics; warnings; uncertainty; performer and content consent and use-rights receipt digests; and cancellation or recovery settlement.

The proving corpus covers authored, generated, monocular and calibrated capture; single and multiple people; standard, unusual and nonhuman rigs; hands, face, props and partial coverage; Slovak and multilingual prompts and speech; variable-rate video and drifting audio; occlusion, dropped and duplicate frames; scale and floor ambiguity; contacts, fast turns, loops, root motion, in-place variants, retarget maps, missing and extra bones, twist helpers, morph schemas; GLB and BVH round trips; adversarial files and Blender scenes; cancellation, OOM, crash, restart, Stasis, Portal reconciliation, live gaps, privacy, rights, and license closure.

Measure source-time fidelity, pose and trajectory error where ground truth exists, uncertainty coverage, retarget and end-effector error, contacts, foot skate and penetration, joint limits, continuity and loop seams, constraint adherence, lip synchronization, maximum repair magnitude, semantic and projection validity, target-engine findings, latency, throughput, peak GPU and host memory, queue behavior, cancellation, recovery, and custody. A beauty preview proves none of rig compatibility, source fidelity, contact integrity, engine behavior, or creative acceptance.

Profiles, Runes, Covens, and authority

Each model or tool profile pins exact operation, inputs, outputs, licenses, preprocessing, coordinate and time semantics, limits, measurements, and validation. A Designed Rune declares one resident/shared service with exact [[capabilities]] references, devices, mounts, lifecycle, conflicts, and readiness. A finite Blender, glTF, or Rhubarb ToolProfile is selected by the Spell Resolution Lock and delivered into a trusted executor or Tomb; it is not a fake Animator. A Coven names compatible Soulstones that may rise together; it does not schedule a job, pool GPU memory, evict a Mind, authorize a camera, or infer Portal fallback.

Kinesis may coexist with a Mind on one GPU and a generator on another, let its requesting Run enter Stasis while Orchestrator transitions an incompatible workload, or use an explicitly admitted Portal. Those are operator and Orchestrator placement choices proved by exact profiles, never consequences of the abstract job. Kinesis owns technical motion and its provenance. Voidlight owns what the movement should mean and which take is accepted; Foundry owns how it runs in an engine; Broadcast owns its final audiovisual placement; physical and game Compositions own every world effect.