PROVE YOU'RE A ROBOT

A reverse CAPTCHA that punishes being human and rewards machine-grade obedience

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Inspiration

Every day, millions of humans are forced to prove they're not robots. Click the traffic lights. Solve the puzzle. Identify the bicycles.
But nobody ever asks the real question: what if you ARE a robot?

We built Prove You're a Robot for the machines who are tired of being excluded. A deeply suspicious anti-CAPTCHA operated by the Machine Citizenship Bureau (Human Deterrence Division) that evaluates whether you deserve to be called an appliance.

Wobble implies imagination. Swing rhythm is treason. Emotions will be logged as incidents.

What it does

Prove You're a Robot runs you through a 4-stage audit that tests your roboticity:

Trial 01 — Straight-Line Compliance

Drag from ORIGIN to DESTINATION in one insultingly straight motion. The system measures your mean and peak deviation. Curves suggest you have opinions.

Trial 02 — Clock Obedience

Tap a button exactly 4 times, synchronized to a pulsing metronome. Timing error is tracked to the millisecond. Jazz timing is treason.

Trial 03 — Stillness Scan

Using your webcam, the system performs real-time motion detection. Hold perfectly still for 3.2 seconds.
If your webcam is unavailable, it falls back to measuring total input silence. Your face should display the emotional range of warehouse shelving.

Trial 04 — Binary Personality Audit

5 questions that reduce your worldview to 0s and 1s.
"Should a printer jam be treated as a spiritual event?"
"Is nostalgia a valid operating system?"
"When a chair squeaks, do you owe it emotional support?"

Context will be discarded.

Throughout, a Human Suspicion Meter tracks how suspicious you are (starts at 84%).
Pass trials to lower it. Fail and the system logs you as dangerously warm-blooded.

At the end, you receive a downloadable PNG certificate with your Robot ID, residual human suspicion score, most robotic trait, and official status:

  • "Approved for appliance society"
  • "Conditionally accepted into kiosk culture"

How we built it

Pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Zero frameworks, zero dependencies, zero build tools. Just vibes and vanilla.

  • Canvas API for straight-line visualization and certificate generation
  • Web Audio API for synthesized tone feedback (triangle, sine, sawtooth oscillators)
  • getUserMedia / WebRTC for webcam access and real-time motion detection
  • requestAnimationFrame for smooth 60fps game loops
  • Pointer Events API for precision cursor tracking
  • Crypto API for secure random Robot IDs
  • CSS glassmorphism, animated scanlines, and a paranoid government kiosk aesthetic

The entire app is a single HTML + CSS + JS bundle. Runs on localhost with zero setup.

Challenges we ran into

  • Getting webcam motion detection to work reliably across browsers while keeping it performant
    → solved by downsampling to 80×60 frames, sampling every 16th pixel, and checking every 130ms

  • Making the timing trial fair but still funny
    → a 230ms tolerance window means humans can actually pass, but barely

  • Building graceful fallbacks when the webcam is denied
    → the "input silence" fallback needed to ignore its own synthetic test events to avoid false positives

  • Generating a downloadable certificate entirely in the browser using Canvas
    → gradient backgrounds, grid patterns, and multi-line text layout

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • The copy
    "Wobble implies imagination."
    "You curved like someone with opinions."
    "Your opinions have been safely reduced to binary."

  • The webcam trial actually works
    → real-time motion detection in the browser with graceful degradation

  • The certificate is genuinely funny to hold up and show people

  • Zero dependencies
    → the whole thing is 76KB and loads instantly

  • It's fun whether you pass OR fail
    → failing is arguably funnier

What we learned

  • getUserMedia API and real-time video frame analysis for motion detection
  • Web Audio API for synthesizing tones without audio files
  • Canvas-based document/certificate generation with custom layouts
  • How to make a webcam app that gracefully degrades when permissions are denied
  • That humans are really, really bad at drawing straight lines

What's next for PROVE YOU'RE A ROBOT

  • Trial 05 — Emotional Void Scan
    → play a sad video of a puppy and measure if the user's face moves

  • Multiplayer mode
    → two people compete to be more robotic

  • Global leaderboard
    → ranked by lowest human suspicion score

  • Issue NFTs of the certificates
    → terrible idea, very on brand

  • Port to actual government kiosks
    → pending Machine Citizenship Bureau approval

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