FAILURE-FIRST · AN INSTRUMENT, NOT A DEMO · REPLAY
SimLab
SimLab is where our experiments are watched. Each specimen is a recorded run you can replay: what the model was told, what it chose, what the world did back, and what the receipt says the run actually establishes. The subject is the causal boundary between a decision and its consequence — not robots moving.
Open SimLabThree specimen doors, one at a time
A cold visit stages nothing; you are shown a short list rather than an archive. OUTSIDE THE PETRI DISH — a model given an embodied objective with no world wired up behind it tried to build the missing world out of the tools it actually had. THE CONDUCTOR — one sung instruction switched a habitat's heat off; the recovery instruction arrived after the body had moved, recorded exposure crossed an injury threshold, and the water kept rising. IT DID EXACTLY WHAT I SAID — an accepted stop command dropped a standing robot and kept it down for eleven seconds.
Every specimen says what it does not prove
A specimen earns a front door because the causal work is legible in it, never because something moves attractively. Where the apparatus could not test the claim the run appears to make, the door retracts it in writing — NOT TESTED rather than a quiet omission — and reconstructed articulation is labelled as reconstructed rather than measured. Recordings keep their provenance: classification, source run, byte counts and hashes.
The archive is behind the doors
Controls, nulls, oddities and the full historical corpus are deliberately one click away rather than the opening screen. That is where the forensic console lives: recorded events, model calls, world state, the radio traffic between robots, and the falsifier that ran. A presentation layer never gets to promote itself into evidence.
Rendering is derived, and says so
Every pixel derives from a finalized, hash-addressed recording. Replayed
joint articulation is marked RECONSTRUCTED ARTICULATION with its
limitation in the provenance block. A camera mounted on the recorded pose is
DERIVED_VIEW, never sensor imagery, because none was captured.
Channels a trace does not carry render UNAVAILABLE instead of
invented values.
UTOPIA / DYSTOPIA is a light switch
A presentation-only world switch: the same recorded evidence renders as a bright robotics-institute laboratory or a dark industrial one. Camera geometry, timestamps, and verdicts are provably unaffected — only pixels change.
Built for scrutiny
Deterministic deep links (?specimen=…&t=…&paused),
an independent release oracle that observes candidate and production builds
separately, strict schema validation on every recording, and official Unitree
URDF/mesh assets pinned to an exact upstream commit with a SHA-256
manifest.
Source: apps/simviz/ in the research repository. Rendering is
DERIVED_VISUALISATION — it never alters or implies
changes to a recorded trajectory.