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RISE

Audiovisual Reader

RISE is a browser-based environment for reading text through time, image, sound, and procedural form.

Enter RISE →

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A text does not have to appear only as a page.

RISE treats reading as an experience that can unfold across multiple dimensions: words can move through time, inhabit a spatial page, coexist with works of art, enter a changing mathematical field, or be arranged into an authored audiovisual composition.

At its center is the Chamber - a reading instrument for combining:

• Text
• Time
• Image
• Sound

The reader chooses the conditions. RISE conducts the experience.

Alongside the Chamber, RISE carries a Catholic devotional instrument: the Chapel, with the Douay-Rheims in seventy-three books, the Rosary and the Stations of the Cross prayed on a liturgy engine at measured pace, calendar-aware mystery sets, and sacred art pinned with verified rights. It is not an extra room. It is the second thing this project is for, and it is built to the standard the rest of the codebase is measured against.

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Current technical priority: JEV integration

JEV integration is the RISE team's current top technical priority. The Scriptorium uses JEV to route a composition request to one of RISE's existing output formats, and the selected route shapes the prompt prepared for the composer. JEV recommends a route; RISE's deterministic examination still decides whether a returned score can be admitted as a reading.

To route with JEV, enter your own JEV API key in the Scriptorium and choose Route with JEV. RISE holds the key only in the mounted interface and sends it in the authorization header of the same-origin routing request; the key is not saved in browser storage. The request contains only the typed intent (up to 2,000 characters) and target word count; RISE's function forwards those fields and your key to TypeSafe SystemOne. Saved texts, Library entries, media, reading history, and proposals are not sent. Prepare locally without JEV remains available when you prefer not to route through JEV.

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The Chamber

A reading begins by tuning four elements.

Text

Bring your own .txt or .md file, paste text directly, or enter through RISE's built-in Library and curated collections.

Local text is processed in the browser. It is not uploaded to a RISE backend.

Time

RISE can present language as a temporal stream rather than a scrolling document.

Choose a reading pace and phrasing mode, then allow the text to arrive unit by unit. Punctuation, sentence structure, authored boundaries, verse lineation, and pacing all participate in the rhythm of presentation.

Visual

A text may coexist with:

• curated works of art,
• astronomical imagery,
• procedural fields,
• fractal flames,
• strange attractors,
• generative line systems,
• personal images,
• or no imagery at all.

Visuals may appear rhythmically, remain continuously behind the text in Gallery, or become part of a deliberately authored score.

Procedural imagery accompanies the text without claiming to illustrate it. The relationship is allowed to remain suggestive, stochastic, and open to interpretation.

Audio

RISE includes browser-native sound environments, tonal systems, optional recitation, and support for authored audiovisual timing.

Sound is treated as part of the reading environment rather than as background media attached afterward.

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Two Ways to Read

RISE currently supports two primary projections of the same reading.

Stream - reading in time

Text arrives sequentially according to a temporal program.

The Stream can range from restrained phrase-by-phrase reading to highly audiovisual compositions in which image and sound change alongside the text.

Page - reading in space

The same source can be projected into a bounded typographic composition.

Page Mode preserves structural boundaries, headings, figures, and reading position while allowing the reader to move between paginated and elongated spatial forms.

The source remains the same.

Only its projection changes.

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The Library

RISE contains a growing curated archive of literature, philosophy, sacred texts, poetry, history, art writing, and other public-domain or appropriately licensed material.

The Library is not treated as an undifferentiated pile of downloaded books.

Source material is processed through an editorial pipeline concerned with:

• edition identity,
• division structure,
• front matter and apparatus,
• running heads and print artifacts,
• provenance,
• rights,
• visual references,
• and readable segmentation.

When RISE removes or transforms material during corpus preparation, those decisions are treated as editorial acts rather than invisible cleanup.

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Art, Science, and Sourced Imagery

RISE can draw from reviewed visual collections rather than unrestricted image search.

Its current visual holdings include museum collections and a curated astronomy collection assembled from sources including NASA, ESA/Hubble, and ESO.

A visual work carries its provenance and rights information with it. When attribution is required, RISE preserves that obligation through the reading surface and the Curia, its source and rights record.

The basic rule is simple:

A work that cannot be shown responsibly should not be shown at all.

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Journeys

Journeys are authored long-form experiences built from the same primitives available elsewhere in RISE.

A Journey may coordinate:

• multiple texts,
• movements,
• passage boundaries,
• visual programs,
• procedural figures,
• sound,
• transitions,
• and silence.

Rather than adding a separate playback engine, Journeys compile into the same underlying reading system used by the Chamber.

They are compositions through RISE rather than videos exported from it.

No Journey is currently published. The compiler and the room are built, but the existing scores quote editions the Library no longer serves, and re-anchoring a composition to a different edition is an editorial act rather than a repair. They are on ice until that work is done properly.

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Workshop and Vault

The Workshop is the authoring surface.

It allows a reader to begin turning their own texts, images, sounds, and selections into structured experiences.

The Vault preserves those compositions.

RISE is gradually moving toward a common representation for authored experience:

source
  + temporal program
  + visual program
  + audio program
  + transitions
  = experience

This model is designed so that a composition can eventually be authored by hand, generated with assistance, saved, exchanged, revisited, and interpreted through multiple reading projections without becoming a collection of unrelated media timelines.

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Design Principles

Several rules have emerged through the development of RISE.

One source, multiple projections

A text's identity should not depend on whether it is being streamed, paginated, narrated, illustrated, or scored.

Content authors; the runtime follows

An authored boundary or deliberate textual structure takes precedence over a generic heuristic.

Absence is better than false substitution

If a requested work, sound, or visual cannot be delivered correctly, RISE prefers stillness or silence to silently replacing it with something else.

Procedural imagery may accompany, never denote

A generated form may live beside a sentence.

It should not impersonate a historical figure, plate, artwork, or other object the source specifically points toward.

Provenance travels with the work

Sources, visual objects, and generated material should remain distinguishable.

Stochasticity is a medium

Not every audiovisual relationship in RISE is authored in advance.

Chance can produce transient correspondences between language and form - meanings that arise through the encounter between computation and perception rather than through literal illustration.

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Safety and Accessibility

RISE includes animated imagery, changing light, procedural motion, audio, and optional rhythmic visual presentation.

The project includes safety boundaries for visually intense modes and respects reduced-motion preferences where applicable.

Readers who are sensitive to flashing imagery, rapid motion, or layered sound should use the calmer presentation modes or disable those elements.

RISE is an experimental reading and creative-technology project. It makes no medical, therapeutic, or cognitive-performance claims.

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Privacy

RISE is browser-native.

User-provided source texts and media stay in RISE's browser workflows. If you explicitly route a Scriptorium request with JEV, RISE's same-origin function sends the typed intent and target word count to TypeSafe SystemOne; it does not send the source text, saved texts, Library entries, media, history, or proposals. See PRIVACY.md for the full disclosure.

Some visual modes retrieve publicly hosted images from external cultural or scientific institutions. Remote-image requests are deliberately configured to avoid sending the reader's RISE page as a referrer.

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Development

RISE keeps reading and authoring in the browser. The opt-in Scriptorium JEV route is served by a same-origin Netlify Function at /api/jev/route, which forwards the bounded request to TypeSafe SystemOne. Local development still runs through the Vite dev server.

Engineering overview: docs/ENGINEERING.md.

Requirements:

• Node.js >=20.19 or >=22.12. The repository pins 20.19.0 in .nvmrc.
• npm

Install:

git clone https://github.com/SyberLabs/RISE.git
cd RISE
npm ci

Run locally on http://localhost:5173/:

npm run dev

To see the reading experience quickly: Try RISE → choose a reading → Begin. Text then streams over time with generative visuals, and the Page control switches to the paginated view.

Build:

npm run build

Testing

npm run test:run     # unit and integration (Vitest, ~2800 tests)
npm run test:e2e     # browser tests (Playwright, Chromium)
node scripts/ci-hygiene.mjs   # properties of the committed artifacts

Two suites reach outside the browser and need system tools installed. src/core/render/encode-mp4.test.js hands real bytes to ffmpeg, and src/core/render/chamber-paint.test.js drives a live Chamber through Playwright Chromium (npx playwright install chromium). Without them those tests fail rather than quietly stubbing themselves.

The end-to-end suite builds the app and starts its own preview server, so do not start one yourself.

ci-hygiene.mjs is the closest thing to a lint gate. It checks properties of shipped artifacts that no unit test can reach: that no credential travels in a delivery URL, that every work owing a credit carries one, that every icon the page promises actually ships, and that no retired name appears in anything a stranger reads.

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Documentation

docs/README.md indexes every document and says which are contracts the code is held to, which are historical records, and which describe work not yet built. The same pages are published to the wiki, generated from this repository.

Two worth reading before changing anything:

• docs/PROJECT-KNOWLEDGE.md - the defect patterns this project keeps rediscovering, and the reasoning behind decisions that look arbitrary from outside.
• AGENTS.md - operating principles, followed by humans and coding agents alike.

For a faster loop before pushing, the gate project is the corridor a reader actually walks - about two minutes rather than eight:

npm run test:e2e:gate

CI runs that corridor first as a fast no, then the whole suite sharded four ways. To run one shard the way CI does:

npm run test:e2e -- --shard=1/4

What CI will ask of a change

Every gate can be run locally, and a pull request has to pass all of them.

node scripts/ci-hygiene.mjs      # licences, icons, manifest, reader-facing names
npm run security:audit           # production and development dependency tree
npm run security:compat          # Kokoro authoring and its Sharp override
npm run build && npm run measure:first-load   # brotli, against a ratcheting budget
npm run docs:diagram             # regenerates the diagram; CI fails if it moved
npx vitest run src/core/system-design.test.js
npm run scriptorium:ci           # a refusal must arrive as an exit status

A change that touches only prose - docs/, .agents/, .cursor/, a root *.md, LICENSE, NOTICE - skips the unit, build, Scriptorium, and browser jobs, and finishes in under a minute. Hygiene and the system design document still run, because they read those files.

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Architecture

RISE is primarily a client-side JavaScript application built with Vite.

src/
├── audio/          Web Audio, recitation, voice and sound systems
├── components/     Portal, Keystones, Chamber, Library, Workshop, Vault,
│                   Chapel, Rosarium, Via, Scriptorium, Curia, Journeys,
│                   Guide, Settings, VisualNavigator
├── content/        archive, chapel, imagery, journeys, science, texts, personalized
├── core/           Session compilation, chunking, pacing and shared models
├── page/           Spatial composition and Page projection
├── sources/        Text and visual providers
└── visuals/        Procedural and sourced visual systems

scripts/
├── corpus preparation and auditing
├── science and museum catalog building
├── source-quality studies
└── offline media generation

The subsystem dependency graph is generated from these directories rather than drawn by hand - see the diagram in docs/specs/ARCHITECTURE.md.

The project uses Vitest for unit and integration testing and Playwright for browser-level verification.

docs/specs/ARCHITECTURE.md holds the engineering contracts these directories are expected to keep.

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Status

Open Beta.

RISE is actively developed and some systems remain experimental.

The current public application is intended to be used, explored, and tested, but the medium is still evolving. Interfaces, collections, compositions, and experimental systems may change as their roles become clearer through use.

The goal is not to finish every possible feature before release.

It is to make the existing experience coherent enough that another person can enter it, encounter something worthwhile, and return without needing its creator standing beside the door.

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Why RISE?

Modern computation has become extraordinarily good at capturing attention.

RISE began from a different question:

What else could a computational environment do for attention?

A browser can hold more than feeds, dashboards, notifications, and optimization loops.

It can also become a place for sustained encounter with language, art, mathematical form, memory, and time.

RISE is one experiment in what that place might be.

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License

RISE application code is released under the Apache License 2.0.

The software licence does not cover everything in this repository. The RISE and SyberLabs names, authored Journeys and compositions, curated texts, and the visual works held by reference each carry their own terms - ASSET-LICENSES.md sets them out, and NOTICE travels with any redistribution.

Archive texts are public domain and remain so. Visual works are held by reference under the licences of the institutions that hold them, and are never redistributed from here.

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SyberLabs

Experimental systems for consciousness, computation, and human–machine experience.

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Published from README.md. Edits made here are overwritten on the next push to main.