V10 Features — The Rail: The Ambient Companion Surface

Status: V10 feature inventory, concept stage. Source: originating design document for V10 — V_SERIES_AMBIENT_RAIL.md (this directory, 2026-07-16), whose decisions D1–D8 are settled and fixed. Like V6 (Egbe), V7 (Mawu), V8 (Ariadne) and V9 (Metis), V10 begins from a design document rather than an implementation backlog; its backlog is V_SERIES_AMBIENT_RAIL_TODOS_2026-07-16.md, and thereafter that checklist is the source of truth for completion state. Implementation has begun (the v10 channel contract and the first rail-kernel policy modules are in the tree); every feature below is scoped against that checklist, and none is shipped until it is checked there.

V10 productizes the sidebar slot — the persistent side panel where most waking media hours actually live (the space YouTube, Twitch, Spotify, and cable news own today) — as a calm, portfolio-wide companion surface called the Rail. Every V-series product publishes an ambient channel into it through one shared contract; full immersion in any V remains a door, but stops being the only door. V10 was designated the tenth product (decision D8) rather than a V1 feature: the surface that arbitrates attention among nine products should not be owned by one of them, and V1's review already warned against adding more surface area to V1 itself. V10 rides V1's identity/entitlement graph (decision D7) but owns nothing account-shaped of its own.

Audience: product, design, platform, streaming/media, trust-and-safety, growth, and accessibility leads scoping V10; every V-team shipping a channel.

Purpose#

Every V1–V9 product is designed as a destination: enter, give full attention, leave. That competes for the scarcest resource (contiguous free attention) and ignores the most abundant one (peripheral presence across an 8-hour day). V10 claims the peripheral slot with four design requirements drawn from why broadcast media wins it and games don't:

1. Progresses without you — every channel is backed by something persistent (a league, a simulation, a case unfolding, a live feed).
2. Glance-legible — the "what's happening now" of any channel renders in a 2-second-readable tile.
3. Absence is free — no streaks lost, no decay, no expiring rewards keyed to attention; V1 Arete's humane vocabulary (done|partial|skip|decline|miss) is adopted portfolio-wide.
4. It's company — co-presence without obligation; mood is a first-class goal.

The product, layered#

• The shell (P0): a native desktop app (Tauri, Rust — decision D7) shaped for the two-thirds/one-third desktop split. Window behavior is the product: launches narrow, docks to a screen edge, stays pinned across restarts, offers always-on-top, and keeps a tray/menu-bar presence (tile glances + audio control) even when the panel is closed.
• The channels: each V implements five contract primitives — presence tile, drip events, micro-acts, dual faces, live moments (see V10_ARCHITECTURE.md §2). The Rail owns composition, batching, arbitration, and policy; channels own content.
• The policy kernel: per-channel loudness grants (0 hidden · 1 tile · 2 tile+drip · 3 elevation-allowed), daypart ceilings, a merged drip timeline, live-moment budgets, three brand rings, and discretion mode.
• The lanes: one arbitrated audio lane (exactly one holder at a time) and one arbitrated video lane (first-party live, overlay/second-screen, and docked third-party YouTube/Twitch — decision D5).

User-facing experience (what V10 ships)#

Presence tiles#

A vertical stack of 2-second-legible "now" renders: an evidence board's state, your ghost's league record, tonight's sky event, cards due, realm population. Silent, no autoplay motion by default, meaningful from cold cache, and degradable to text-only (required for discretion mode and the watch surface).

The timeline#

One merged feed of drip events from all subscribed channels — a witness statement released, your ghost upset a higher seed, a claim verified live. Channels cannot interrupt: the Rail decides batching, ordering, and delivery timing as daypart policy (deep work holds drips; breaks flush them). A global drip budget on top of per-channel limits keeps ten subscribed channels from becoming noise; overflow degrades to per-channel rollups, never silent drops.

Micro-acts#

Interactions of ≤30 seconds executable inside the Rail without launching the product: pin a suspect, answer two review cards, tweak the ghost's tendencies, approve a realm collab, do one breath with Tara. Micro-acts are the top of the dive funnel (glance → micro-act → live moment → dive), and every dive deep-links into the exact moment that prompted it — never a main menu.

Loudness: calm by default, granted never taken#

The single mechanism reconciling "respect attention" with "engaged players want to be interrupted": a per-channel user-set grant, with effective loudness = min(daypart ceiling, channel grant) plus explicit user-pinned exceptions ("always break through for V2 finals"). New channels default to 1. Elevation requests are typed, budgeted per channel per day, and unspent budgets do not accumulate. Non-negotiable invariants: no absence punishment, no autoplay motion/sound at loudness ≤2, and success is measured in docked-hours and micro-act quality — never interrupts-clicked.

Dayparts#

The choreography spine (user-tunable; calendar-aware in a later phase): morning brief (ceiling 2 — the Thread: practice, Veritas audio briefing, today's case opens, Daily Wonder, Nyx sky), deep work (1 — audio lane + silent tiles only), breaks (2 — the micro-act surface), lunch (3 — live windows, highlight video, realm surf), wind-down (3 — accusation window, recaps, concerts, Ori reflection). Dayparts gate what may surface, never what the user owes.

Discretion mode (P0, not polish)#

A glanceable sidebar is the opposite of private, and work screens get shared: one-keystroke instant hide, per-channel text-only tiles, and screen-share detection that auto-collapses personal tiles (health, Ori, the adult ring, even the active case) to neutral text. Protects the wellness ring as much as the adult one.

The channel lineup (fit and phase, per the design doc §7)#

V1's remaining house channels (Nyx sky-and-awe, Tara presence bells, Arete gentle progress) join as wellness-ring tiles; Nisaba/Metis rooms fold into the V9 channel rather than duplicating it.

Dual audiences, dual faces#

Every channel declares a spectator face and a player face on the same tile (decision D2): featured league vs. your ghost, public case vs. your evidence board. The Rail picks the face from entitlement state. Spectating is a success state — the front-door audience may watch for months and never dive, and is never measured as failed conversion.

Brand rings and policy walls#

Three rings (design doc §9): wellness (default identity — V1 house channels, V9, V3 Motion, Ori; calm invariants at their strictest), games (V2/V4/V5/V7/V8/V3 Stage; loudness 3 available, live-event energy earned), and adult (Aphrodite content only — invisible until explicit age-verified opt-in, separate brand, web/desktop only, private/wind-down dayparts only, excluded from Ori narration, watch parties, and all cross-promotion). Prediction micro-acts are points-and-bragging-rights only; anything wager-shaped is out of scope and requires its own review.

Surfaces#

The mobile/watch satellites can never carry the adult ring — a per-surface channel-availability matrix enforced in the contract schema from day one.

Non-goals#

• Not an engagement machine. The metrics are locked before launch: docked-hours, micro-act completion quality, voluntary-return rate, and a calm SLO (elevations per user-day under a ceiling). Interrupts-clicked is structurally absent from the metric set.
• Not a tenth content pipeline. V10 composes what the Vs already built (the consolidation audit's duplication census — 7 matchmaking, 5 rollback, ~6 battle-pass, 2 C2PA signers — is the cautionary tale). One channel contract, one streaming substrate (generalized from Aphrodite's seventeen services), one signer (@oshun/content-signing).
• Not a moderation venue for third-party video. Docked YouTube/Twitch is the user's own embed; we host the slot geometry, we do not moderate the content (legal review gates watch-party chat adjacency).
• Not gambling. Points-only predictions, revisited never lightly.

Definition of done (Phase A exit)#

The native shell exists with tiles, timeline, loudness grants, dayparts, both lanes with third-party docking, and discretion mode; the four P0 channels (V8 Case Files, V9 Wonder & Recall, V3 Motion, V3 Stage) drip real content daily; the invariant suite (no absence punishment, no autoplay ≤2, budgeted elevations, calm-only metrics) runs green. The honest exit test, in the design doc's words: does the author actually leave it docked next to Claude Code for a full week? Full phase gates and task-level acceptance criteria live in V_SERIES_AMBIENT_RAIL_TODOS_2026-07-16.md.