The medium produces its own light from an energy source, pushing photons outward from the surface. Every screen you have ever used, every projector, every neon sign operates on this principle.

The image exists because energy is being continuously converted into visible light. Remove the power and the image vanishes instantly. The medium is active by nature — always on, or always off. Nothing persists.

The medium contains pigments or dyes that selectively absorb certain wavelengths of light and reflect the remainder diffusely — in all directions equally. A photograph reflects the same image to every viewer at every position.

No power required. The image is inseparable from the substrate and will persist as long as the substrate does. Permanent. Passive. Angle-independent. The image is fixed at the moment of creation and identical from every direction.

The medium redirects ambient light with geometric precision using an array of computed mirror facets. Unlike absorptive media, which scatter light uniformly, each facet in a Flective surface is precisely angled to redirect a specific portion of the ambient light field toward one specific viewer position.

The result is an image that exists only at the designed viewpoint — invisible from other angles, powered by nothing, permanent in its geometry. The room itself provides the palette. The surface provides the computation. Remove the viewer, and the image ceases to exist.

This is the third kind. It has existed as a physical possibility since light first reflected from a surface. It required computation to become a medium.

The ambient light field surrounding any object contains all colors simultaneously, separated by direction. A precisely angled mirror surface is a directional selector: it intercepts light arriving from one specific angle and redirects it toward one specific viewer position. That is the entire primitive mechanism.

Computational Reflective Imaging (CRI) applies this principle deliberately, at scale. For a given viewer position, CRI calculates the surface orientation each mirror pixel must have to redirect its assigned color toward that viewer — and only that viewer. The result is an array of tiny facets, each facing a slightly different direction, collectively resolving as a designed image.

The surface carries the geometry permanently and passively — no power, no refresh cycle, no emissive display state. The image appears only when light and a viewer are present at the right conditions, and it changes subtly each time because the ambient light is never exactly the same twice. The surface persists. The image is re-formed in use.