sensor capturer

a device that captures sensory experiences — not just video and audio, but potentially smell, touch, and other modalities. the rich people niche is "scared of losing stuff" (memories, experiences). prior art includes Sensorama (1962), Narrative Clip, Microsoft SenseCam, and MIT Media Lab work.

a related extension is the "recursion device" that would measure brain waves and input brain waves, going beyond passive capture into active neural interfacing. there is a connection to sleep and learning research showing sound and smell tied to memory consolidation.

the evaluation from build notes rated this as: "will learn so much, not good at all, people will care so much (its super hard)" — acknowledging both the difficulty and the potential impact. this connects to the smell resetter research and the brain rewinder concept. the universal data capturer is the software-side equivalent of this hardware vision.

spreadsheet evaluation: the "Read/Imprinting Device" variant scored originality 10/10 (highest possible), excitement 7/10, MVP 16+ weeks. competitive landscape: OpenBCI and Muse do EEG reading, transcranial stimulation (tDCS/tACS) devices exist for input — no consumer product closes the loop (reading brain state and writing back a pattern in real-time). academic closed-loop neuromodulation exists but not as a consumer product. extremely ambitious hardware+neuro project, needs significant neuroscience expertise and likely IRB considerations. could start with off-the-shelf EEG + tACS modules as proof of concept, needs ilab access. tech depth 10/10 (maximum), labeled [DO THIS] — "builds on your Orbit EEG experience, signal processing, ML on neural data, hardware integration — extremely impressive if you get any result at all."

timeline

[2025-12-22] initial capture in ideaflow — recursion device concept
[2025-08-31] evaluated in apple notes build-notes — rated as hardest but highest impact
[2025-09-26] discussed with evan wang — compared to AI twin and life planner
[2026-04-10] google sheets evaluation — 10/10 originality, 7/10 excitement, 10/10 tech depth, [DO THIS] tier, MVP 16+ weeks