aura.refract · the reading engine
A prism doesn't decide what color you are — it just splits the light and lets the spectrum fall where it falls. This is how ours reads you: measure the light in the room, lift it off, and read the one color that's actually yours.
↓ drag the room, drag the subject — watch the read move
The optics bench
Everything below runs the actual reading math on the pixels in that frame — measure the room's white point, divide it out, then read the dominant hue that's left. Move the sliders and watch the band change.
The left chip reads the raw dominant hue with no white balance. Flip white balance off and watch most rooms collapse to red — that's the room's warm cast winning, not you. White balance is what lets the rest of the spectrum through.
Across a whole room of people
Two hundred different people, photographed in the same warm room. Here's how the read lands — with the room's cast left in, and with it divided out.
The physics
Three facts about rooms and light shape every read. Account for them and the whole spectrum opens up; ignore them and everything slides toward red.
Skin, faces, lamplight — all of it lives in the red-orange corner of the wheel. Leave it in and the brightest hue in almost any frame is simply “the room is warm,” which reads as red. So we measure the room's own color first and divide it out.
A spectrum is continuous, so we read it that way — a fine histogram, refined between bins, down to about ten degrees of hue. No snapping the precise color you reflect back to the nearest preset.
Reading hue continuously keeps every color reachable — none of the seven can fall into a gap between fixed steps. The whole spectrum is in play, on every read.
White-balance the read, then let the rarer light shine. A prism only shows its spectrum once you account for the white light feeding it — so we measure the room's own color and divide it out, the same chromatic adaptation your eyes do without asking. What's left is the color that's actually yours — the reflected light the room didn't put there. A gentle equalizer then keeps the over-common warm hues from drowning out the rest — it never invents a color, it just stops one band from swallowing the spectrum. Same person, same physics — but now the read is you, not the lamp behind you.
The simulators on this page run the same white-balance → histogram → band logic that ships in the lens. Aura is for delight, not diagnosis. · The full build story — the red bug, gray-world, and what we're prototyping for events — lives in the lab notes → · questions → allofus@refractventures.co