Barcode and QR scanning
Packaged goods, electronics, books, media.
HOME CARTOGRAPHY · CONCEPT V0 · A MIKE HOYDICH PRODUCTION
Your house gets a map. Your stuff gets a ledger.
Buy a device, walk your home, and index everything you own - barcodes, QR codes, computer vision - into a private, user-owned inventory that becomes your personal data API and MCP server. Your house gets a map, your stuff gets a ledger, and AI gets permissioned access to both.
Sibling to Digital Identity Cartography: identity maps who you are, Home Cartography maps what you have. See the fictional demo household for the index in action, or use the field kit to index one real room today.
THE DEVICE
The device is the wedge. The index is the product.
Purpose-built home scanner, or phone-first app with an optional dedicated device. The device is the wedge; the index is the product.
Computer vision
Everything without a code: furniture, art, tools, clothing, plants.
Spatial awareness
Room-by-room mapping so every item has a location, not just an identity. "The drill" becomes "the drill, garage, second shelf."
Receipt and email ingestion
Fills in what the camera cannot: price paid, purchase date, warranty start.
THE HOME INDEX
Every object, structured and user-owned.
Identity
Product, model, serial number where scannable.
Location
Room, container, shelf - the coordinates of your stuff.
Provenance
Purchase date, price, retailer, linked receipt.
Condition
Photos and state over time.
Documents
Manuals, warranties, insurance riders.
Valuation
Live estimated value, refreshed against market comps.
UTILITY
The boring superpowers.
Valuation
Per item, per room, whole home. Insurance-claim-ready export after a fire, flood, or theft.
Warranty and lifecycle
Automatic warranty tracking, recall alerts, "your water heater is 11 years old" nudges.
Insurance
A verified inventory is the best contents-coverage documentation ever. Carriers should discount for it.
Find my anything
"Where are the passports" is a query, not a scavenger hunt.
NEW INTERACTION MODELS
Agents that know what you own.
Things are easier to sell
Every item already has photos, model number, condition history, and comps. "Sell the Peloton" is a one-line instruction - the listing writes itself.
I will go see if the XYZ is available
Agents check your inventory before you buy, lend against it with permission, or shop only for what is genuinely missing.
Household handoffs
Moving, estate planning, and splits become data operations instead of archaeology.
SCORING + RECOMMENDATIONS
An honest mirror for your stuff.
Stuff-per-square-foot score
An honest density metric. Too much stuff for your footage? The system says so, kindly, and lists the items you have not touched in two years.
Duplication detection
Four phone chargers, three tape measures. Sell, donate, or stop buying.
Replacement intelligence
"Most likely to fail next year" and "the newer model uses 60% less energy."
Room grades
Utilization, value concentration, clutter trend over time.
GAMES + ENTERTAINMENT
Your inventory is a playground.
Scavenger hunts
Generated from your actual inventory - kids, parties, or agents playing each other.
Collection meta-games
Completion tracking for books, vinyl, LEGO; trade matching with friends' permissioned indexes.
Antiques Roadshow mode
Point at the weird thing from grandma; get provenance research and a valuation narrative.
Time capsule
Your home index as a longitudinal artifact - what did the living room look like in 2026?
WHY NOW
The pieces just arrived.
- Vision models can finally identify arbitrary household objects without a barcode.
- MCP makes "your data as a server" a real, standard interface instead of a CSV export.
- Agents are becoming the buyer, seller, and scheduler of record - they need a ground-truth model of your household to act well.
- Insurance, resale, and estate workflows still run on shoeboxes of receipts.
BUSINESS SKETCH
Wedge, subscription, take, partners.
- Device sale: One-time revenue; the acquisition wedge.
- Index subscription: Storage, valuation refreshes, warranty and recall monitoring, MCP hosting.
- Transaction take: Resale listings, insurance referrals, buy-back and trade-in flows.
- Partner API: Insurers, movers, estate services pay for user-approved, scoped access.
GUARDRAILS · DAY ONE, NON-NEGOTIABLE
Private by default. Owned by you.
- The index is user-owned. Export everything, delete everything, always.
- No selling inventory data. Partner access is per-request, user-approved, scoped, and logged.
- No public inventory by default; sharing is opt-in per item or collection.
- Valuations are informational, never financial advice.
- Sensitive zones - kids' rooms, safes - can be excluded from scanning entirely.
OPEN QUESTIONS
Still being surveyed.
- Dedicated hardware, or phone-first with a hardware upsell?
- MCP server local (privacy-max), hosted (convenience-max), or both?
- Cold start: what is the minimum viable scan - one room? 50 items? - that delivers a "wow" before fatigue sets in?
MACHINE-READABLE
