Did Strange Days come true?
The SQUID, the film's headline device, is still far off: we can roughly decode what a cooperating brain sees, and we cannot write it into anyone else's. Almost everything around it arrived, including head-worn playback, point-of-view police cameras, and a recorded killing that brought an officer a murder conviction.
Read the review · 7.2/10 →
How this P(n) was calculated
Each prediction is weighted 1–5 by how pivotal it is to the story: 5 is the core premise, 1 is background detail. Arrived scores 1, arriving 0.5, everything else 0. P(n) is the weighted points divided by the total weight.
| Claim | Prediction · why this weight | Weight | Status | Value | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| STRANGEDAYS-1 | A device records a person's full sensory experience straight from the brain and plays it back into someone else's. Core premise: the SQUID recording and replaying experience is the film's central technology. |
5 | FAR | 0 | 0 |
| STRANGEDAYS-2 | Police officers routinely wear cameras that record their encounters from their own point of view. Texture: an extrapolation of the film's point-of-view recording; its police don't actually wear cameras. |
2 | ARRIVED | 1 | 2 |
| STRANGEDAYS-3 | People pay to watch recorded first-person experiences through a head-worn device. Major: Lenny deals playback clips; the black market in other people's experiences is his world and livelihood. |
4 | ARRIVED | 1 | 4 |
| STRANGEDAYS-4 | A recording of police killing a civilian overturns the official account and leads to a murder conviction. Major: the plot turns on a recording of police killing Jeriko One and the fight to make it public. |
4 | ARRIVED | 1 | 4 |
| Total | 15 | 10 |
P(n) = 10 ÷ 15 = 67% · unweighted average 75%
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STRANGEDAYS-1
A device records a person's full sensory experience straight from the brain and plays it back into someone else's.
Weight 5/5 · Core premise: the SQUID recording and replaying experience is the film's central technology.
Researchers can now reconstruct blurry versions of images people are looking at, and the gist of stories they hear, from fMRI scans with AI models. These systems need a large scanner, hours of training on a cooperating volunteer, and they only read. Nobody has a credible route to writing a full recorded experience into another brain. The read half has started. The write half is science fiction. 123
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STRANGEDAYS-2
Police officers routinely wear cameras that record their encounters from their own point of view.
Weight 2/5 · Texture: an extrapolation of the film's point-of-view recording; its police don't actually wear cameras.
By 2016 nearly half of US general-purpose law enforcement agencies had acquired body-worn cameras. The evidence that cameras change police behaviour is weaker than the hopes placed in them. A large randomised trial in Washington DC found no detectable average effect on use of force or complaints. 45
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STRANGEDAYS-3
People pay to watch recorded first-person experiences through a head-worn device.
Weight 4/5 · Major: Lenny deals playback clips; the black market in other people's experiences is his world and livelihood.
Consumer VR headsets went on sale in 2016, and Apple launched its own headset with immersive filmed content in 2024. The market is real but small, and the heaviest spender, Meta, began cutting VR staff and studios in 2026. The playback deck exists. It plays back sight and sound, not the full nervous system. 67
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STRANGEDAYS-4
A recording of police killing a civilian overturns the official account and leads to a murder conviction.
Weight 4/5 · Major: the plot turns on a recording of police killing Jeriko One and the fight to make it public.
Darnella Frazier's phone video of George Floyd's death contradicted the initial police account. In April 2021 Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder and manslaughter. The film's version has a recording, a cover-up and a conviction, and that sequence happened. What the film got wrong is how rare the outcome is and who would be holding the camera. 89
- FOR Stable Diffusion with Brain Activity. Osaka University / NICT (CVPR 2023), 2023. Takagi and Nishimoto reconstruct high-resolution images from fMRI recordings using a latent diffusion model.
- FOR Semantic reconstruction of continuous language from non-invasive brain recordings. Nature Neuroscience, 2023-05-01. Decodes the gist of continuous language from fMRI.
- AGAINST Brain Activity Decoder Can Reveal Stories in People's Minds. UT News, University of Texas at Austin, 2023-05-01. The decoder needs an fMRI scanner, hours of training per person and a willing subject. Untrained or resisting subjects produce unusable output.
- FOR Body-Worn Cameras in Law Enforcement Agencies, 2016. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2018-11-16. 47% of general-purpose law enforcement agencies had acquired body-worn cameras by 2016.
- AGAINST Body Worn Cameras. The Lab @ DC, 2017. A randomised trial with DC's Metropolitan Police found no detectable average effect of cameras on documented uses of force or civilian complaints.
- FOR Introducing Apple Vision Pro: Apple's first spatial computer. Apple, 2023-06-05. Apple unveils a head-worn computer built partly around immersive video and recorded spatial memories.
- AGAINST Meta lays off VR employees, underscoring Zuckerberg's pivot to AI. CNBC, 2026-01-14. The biggest investor in headsets cuts VR staff and studios.
- FOR Darnella Frazier: A teen with 'a cell phone and sheer guts' is credited for Derek Chauvin's murder conviction. CNN, 2021-04-21. Credits a bystander's phone video with Chauvin's conviction.
- FOR Darnella Frazier, teen who filmed Floyd's arrest, celebrates Chauvin's guilty verdict. The Seattle Times, 2021-04-21. Reports the verdict and the role of Frazier's footage.
Ledger updated 1 Nov 2026. All works on the P(n) Board · Method