the engine is open.

As of today, the page that explains exactly how the lens reads you is public: aura.refractventures.co/engine. Not a diagram. Not a metaphor. The actual math, running live in your browser, with sliders — so you can move the room's light around and watch the read change.

We kept it internal at first, the way you instinctively guard anything you think of as your edge. Then I realized the edge was never the algorithm. The edge is that we're the aura camera willing to show you the algorithm.

What the engine actually does.

Four steps, and none of them are magic.

First, we estimate the room. Every frame carries the color of the light it was shot in — the warm cast of a kitchen bulb, the blue of an overcast window. We average the lit pixels and get the room's white point.

Second, we divide it out. That's the white balance — the same chromatic adaptation your own visual system performs constantly without asking you. Your brain doesn't think a white shirt turns orange at golden hour; neither should the lens. What's left after the division is the color the room didn't put there.

Third, we read the hue continuously. The light that remains gets binned into a fine histogram — thirty-six bins, ten degrees each, weighted by saturation and brightness — and then refined between bins, so the read lands on a spectrum, not on a preset.

Fourth, the dominant hue maps to one of seven bands by wavelength — the same seven bands a prism throws on a wall, red at ~625–740 nm down to violet at ~380–450 nm. That band, and the reading that comes with it, is your aura.

The bug we're not hiding.

The first version of the engine turned almost everyone red. The reason is embarrassing and instructive, so it's documented on the engine page in full: skin, faces, and lamplight all live in the warm corner of the color wheel, and without white balance the brightest hue in nearly every frame is simply "this room is warm." We fixed it with the correction above, plus a gentle equalizer that stops the over-common warm hues from drowning the rest — it never invents a color, it just gives the whole spectrum a fair shot.

"The edge was never the algorithm. The edge is being the aura camera willing to show you the algorithm."

What we won't publish.

Numbers we don't have. You won't find a live counter on our homepage pretending thousands of reads are happening this second, and you won't find "16% of our reads come back cyan" on a color page. The lens is weeks old. When we have real statistics, we'll publish real statistics — and they'll be interesting precisely because you'll know they're real.

Same policy at events. The optional hand sensor we bring to in-person nights is a skin-conductance sensor — it measures electrodermal activity, a real physiological signal, and maps it to a band: activated leans warm, calm leans cool. We could call it a biofield reader. It isn't one, so we don't.

Why this matters to me.

I built the first version of this engine myself, at my kitchen table, reasoning from one question: what does the camera actually see? Everything the brand claims stands on that question. Precision isn't the opposite of wonder — a prism is more wondrous once you know it's just refraction, not less. The rainbow doesn't need the mystery.

So: the engine is open. Go move the sliders. If you know optics and you find something we got wrong, tell us — we'll fix it in the open, too.

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— Ashley