V9 Features — Metis: A Curious Ape's Guide to Reality

Status: V9 feature inventory. Source: originating design document for V9. Like V6 (Egbe), V7 (Mawu), and V8 (Ariadne) — and unlike V1–V5, whose feature maps were derived from a pre-existing implementation backlog — V9 begins from this document and V9_PRODUCT_ANALYSIS.md. V9_TODOS.md is derived from the scope defined here, and thereafter the backlog checklist becomes the source of truth for completion state.

V9 productizes the Metis education domain (services/metis/, libs/metis/*) into a consumer flagship and composes it with the Oshun knowledge/science constellation (Nyx, Kalika, Sophia, Nous, Mnemosyne, Nisaba, Demeter, Saraswati, Seshat), the generative content factory (Isis, Yemaya, Hathor, Psyche, Euterpe), the shared Iris agent runtime, the meditation engine libraries, and the V2–V8 game substrates. It runs under the V1 platform (identity, billing, the Agentic AI Studio governance plane) and the V7 Sekhmet safety regime.

Audience: product, design, learning-science, narrative, generative-AI, science, gameplay, avatar/voice, audio, trust-and-safety, growth, accessibility, and rights leads scoping V9.

Inspired by the design footprint of NotebookLM, 3Blue1Brown, Kurzgesagt, Cosmos (Sagan/Tyson), Brilliant.org, PhET, Bret Victor's explorable explanations, Outer Wilds, Universe Sandbox, Civilization's Civilopedia, and the research lines cited in V9_SOTA_RESEARCH.md. Date derived: 2026-06-13.

Naming note: V9's product is Metis (the existing education domain, here productized) and its subsystems are named for the Promethean gift of fire — the myth of the curious ape receiving the spark of understanding — each name checked against the existing libs/, apps/, and DOMAINS/ registries to avoid collision (Atlas, Prometheus, Aletheia, Chiron, Hephaestus, Theia, Agora are free; Mnemosyne and Sekhmet are reused as explicit bridges to existing assets). Here Mnemosyne is the existing learning-science domain (libs/mnemosyne/*), reused via libs/v9/mnemosyne-glue — a real package reuse, not a new V9 codename. (V8's separate narrative-continuity graph, @yemaya/canon-graph, was briefly codenamed "Mnemosyne Canon" and is now named Palimpsest to avoid the clash; see the README naming note.) The myth is the deliberate metaphor: Prometheus stole fire — knowledge — from the gods and gave it to the clay-made humans, and was punished for it; V9 is the unapologetic gift of that fire to anyone who wants it.

This feature map has been decomposed into focused pages under features/. This file remains the canonical hub — it preserves every section heading (so existing features§"…" and V9_features.md#… anchors keep resolving); the in-depth, code-grounded companion pages live under features/. Start at the features page index. The runtime/package architecture is in V9_ARCHITECTURE.md / architecture/.

Purpose#

This document is the feature map for V9. V9 is one coherent product — a learning experience for curious apes — not a tool. It turns the question a person actually has about reality into a true, beautiful, interactive, memorable lesson, and it braids the scientific and the human so that understanding the universe makes you feel more at home in it.

V9's thesis is integration + productization (see V9_PRODUCT_ANALYSIS.md §1, §3). The Oshun monorepo already ships the two halves — a production-grade learning backend (Metis) plus the kernels that compute reality (Nyx, Kalika) and the factory that makes content beautiful (Isis/Yemaya/Hathor/Psyche/Euterpe) — but they are not connected into a delightful consumer product, and there is no unified "map of reality" to navigate them by. V9 builds the missing connective tissue (the Atlas knowledge graph, the explorable runtime, the consumer experience layer) and binds everything behind the seven gates so nothing untrue, unsafe, ungrounded, or pedagogically broken reaches a learner. (See V9_GAP_ANALYSIS.md.)

The product, layered#

• Metis — the product: A Curious Ape's Guide to Reality. Wisdom made navigable; the goddess of cunning intelligence as a learning companion.
• A Wonder — the atom of the experience: a real question a person has ("why do we dream?", "what is a black hole made of?", "what did the first writing say?"). Wonders are the input, not syllabi.
• A Lesson — what V9 generates from a wonder + the learner's model: a grounded explanation, an embodied teacher, at least one explorable, and the retrieval practice that makes it stick. Generated solve-first from vetted ground truth, then realized (the V8 "LLM proposes, the verifier disposes" discipline, retargeted from fairness to truth).
• A Thread — a chain of lessons that a single wonder unspools into; the good version of a rabbit hole, with mastery checkpoints instead of autoplay.
• The Atlas — the learner's personal, growing map of reality: the concept-cosmos they have illuminated, with the dark unexplored regions glittering as invitations.

Learner-facing experience (what V9 ships)#

1. Ask a wonder (the front door)#

The product opens not on a course catalog but on an invitation: what do you wonder about? A learner types or speaks a real question in their own words. Behind it, Atlas resolves the free-text wonder to concept-nodes and their prerequisite closure; Theia decides whether to answer directly, scaffold, or open a thread. There is also a "surprise me" path — Theia surfaces a wonder the learner didn't know they had, drawn from the frontier of what they almost know.

2. The grounded, interactive lesson#

Each lesson is generated, not pre-authored, and ships with:

• A grounded explanation — every claim bound to a Sophia source the learner can open ("where did this come from?"), every STEM value computed by Nyx/Kalika rather than asserted. The "show your sources" transparency that makes NotebookLM trusted, made native.
• An embodied teacher (Chiron) — a persona with a voice (Psyche/Metis live-voice), a face and gestures (Isis), and a personality (Hathor), who teaches Socratically rather than lecturing, and who remembers the learner across sessions (Mnemosyne).
• At least one explorable (Hephaestus) — a real, manipulable model of the idea: a Nyx-rendered sky, a Kalika physics simulation, or a generated interactive widget. The learner predicts, then tests, then sees.
• A score and a mood (Euterpe) — adaptive music that supports attention and swells at the moment of insight, never distracting from it.
• A retrieval checkpoint (Mnemosyne) — a short active-recall moment that strengthens memory and feeds the knowledge-trace.

3. The embodied teacher you can talk to#

Chiron is not a chat box. It is a present, voiced, animated tutor that listens (barge-in, turn-taking — the Metis live-voice runtime already implements this), adapts pacing and tone to detected engagement (Psyche emotion recognition), and shifts between integrity modes the Metis backend already defines — teach / hint / practice / do-not-complete-for-me — so it guides discovery and refuses to just hand over answers. Chiron can take many faces: a warm generalist, a domain specialist, or a grounded historical persona (a Stoic from Epictetus' actual words, Galileo at his telescope) — always labeled as a reconstruction and bounded by the source texts (Nisaba), never inventing personal claims.

4. Explorables, sandboxes, and playable reality#

The Hephaestus workshop is where V9 stops being a video and becomes a place:

• The live cosmos (Nyx). Any astronomy concept becomes a slider on the learner's actual sky: drag the date across millennia ("time-travel"), make the universe infinite, watch a planet's phase change, fly to an exoplanet.
• Computed physics & math (Kalika). Adjust slit width and watch the interference pattern recompute from the Schrödinger equation; manipulate a spacetime diagram; step a symbolic derivation and see each algebraic move.
• Generative explorables. For ideas without a pre-built kernel, Prometheus generates a runnable interactive widget on demand (the Claude-Artifacts/ Canvas primitive, V9_SOTA_RESEARCH.md §4) — verified for correctness, not just plausibility.
• Learn-by-playing (the game bridge). Existing Oshun games become labs: the V2 racing mode exposes real vehicle dynamics (suspension, downforce, gear ratios) so tuning is an applied-physics lesson; cosmic exploration teaches astronomy; a strategy loop teaches game theory and economics. The lesson is hidden inside the play, then made explicit when the learner is ready.

5. Threads and the personal Atlas#

A lesson never dead-ends. Theia turns every answer into the next, better question and offers the thread forward (Olbers' paradox → the age of the universe → the cosmic microwave background → the Big Bang). The learner's progress is rendered as a literal map of reality — the concept-cosmos they have lit up, mastery shown as brightness, the unexplored shown as inviting dark. Progress is a star map, not a progress bar.

6. Remembering forever (the mastery loop)#

Mnemosyne schedules spaced retrieval at the moment the learner is about to forget (FSRS), tracks mastery per concept (knowledge tracing), and adaptively sequences what comes next to keep difficulty in the flow channel. The product optimizes for durable understanding weeks later, not session length. Verifiable credentials (Metis already issues Open Badges 3.0 / CLR) can attest to genuine mastery for those who want to showcase it.

7. The soulful braid (science + the human)#

V9 deliberately places the scientific next to the human:

• a neuroscience-of-attention thread sitting beside a meditation session (the meditation engine libraries are in the monorepo);
• a cosmology lesson beside the myth humans told about the same sky (Hathor) and the actual ancient text that recorded it (Nisaba);
• a lesson on deep time beside the felt vastness of it. Theia orchestrates the emotional arc — awe → curiosity → understanding → the next question — so the product lifts the spirit rather than flattening wonder into trivia.

8. Make & share (the Agora commons)#

Learners and educators can steer Prometheus to author guided journeys (set the topic, tone, depth, audience) and publish vetted ones to the community through the V7 Mawu distribution + Sekhmet safety regime. Generated explorables and short explainer films are shareable social objects — the free-tier wow that drives growth (V9_PRODUCT_ANALYSIS.md §9).

9. On-demand explainer films#

For learners who want to watch rather than poke, Prometheus + Yemaya generate a short, accurate explainer film — a NotebookLM-style Video Overview, but computed-correct (Manim-style precise animation for math/physics, V9_SOTA_RESEARCH.md §2) and embodied (Chiron narrates). Provenance-stamped (C2PA) like every generated asset.

Subsystem ownership#

The seven gates (every lesson, before any learner sees it)#

(Restated from README.md for the design audience; full mechanics in V9_ARCHITECTURE.md.)

Non-goals#

• V9 does not replace school, become an LMS, or chase institutional procurement at launch — Metis's LMS/credential interop makes that a deliberate later motion (P3), not the opening.
• V9 does not build a new agent loop or model — it consumes the shared Iris runtime and the V1 governance plane (the repo's "no new agent loops" rule).
• V9 does not add new asset providers — it orchestrates Isis's existing ones.
• V9 does not let an LLM freestyle facts — the grounded ground-truth + computed kernels are authoritative; the LLM realizes and teaches the verified skeleton (the V8 discipline, retargeted to truth).
• V9 does not optimize for time-on-app — the north star is durable understanding (V9_PRODUCT_ANALYSIS.md §11), and the product is content to end a short, satisfying session.
• V9 does not block its P1 web experience on the Bellona UE cook path — deep in-game lessons are a P2/P3 motion (V9_PRODUCT_ANALYSIS.md §10).

Definition of done (GA)#

V9 is GA-complete when, with no human authoring per lesson:

1. A learner asks a wonder; within the cost/latency budget, Prometheus generates a complete, interactive lesson.
2. Aletheia has proven every claim grounded and accurate (G1/G2), and the lesson passes G3–G7.
3. Chiron teaches it live — embodied, voiced, Socratic — and adapts in real time.
4. At least one explorable lets the learner manipulate the idea.
5. Mnemosyne schedules the retrieval practice that makes it stick and sequences what comes next.
6. Theia braids the lesson into a thread that produces the target arc (awe → curiosity → understanding → the next question).
7. Everything is reproducible from a seed and auditable; nothing untrue, unsafe, ungrounded, or pedagogically broken can reach a learner.