How It Works
What is meten.app?
meten.app is a collection of sensory memory games. Each game follows the same principle: you are shown a stimulus - a color, a sound, an angle, a brightness level - given a brief moment to memorize it, then asked to reproduce it as accurately as possible from memory alone.
Your score reflects how close your answer was to the original, measured using perceptual scales calibrated to how the human senses actually work. The goal is to train and track your sensory recall over time.
There are no tricks, no distractions, and no luck involved. A high score means your perceptual memory is genuinely precise.
The Games
Color
A color swatch is displayed for a few seconds. After it disappears, you use a color picker to reproduce the exact hue, saturation, and brightness from memory. Color is the most demanding game - the human eye can distinguish millions of shades, so even a small drift in hue or saturation registers as an error.
Sound
A pure tone plays through your headphones or speakers. You then reproduce the pitch by dragging a slider across a frequency range from a low bass note to a high soprano tone. Sound scoring uses musical cents, the standard unit musicians use to measure pitch accuracy.
Angle
A line is shown at a specific angle. After it disappears, you rotate a dial to match the angle from memory. Target angles avoid ambiguous near-horizontal or near-vertical orientations. Wraparound is handled correctly - 350° vs 10° counts as only 20° apart.
Brightness
A gray square is displayed at a specific luminance level on a 0–100 scale. After it disappears, you set a slider to match the brightness from memory. Targets avoid the extremes where subtle differences become nearly invisible.
How Scoring Works
Every game measures the perceptual distance between your answer and the target, then maps that distance to a score from 0 to 10 per round. Your session score is the average across all rounds, scaled to 100 - so a perfect game is 100.
The scoring curve
The mapping from error to score is not linear. Small errors are penalized gently; larger errors converge toward zero. A perfect answer always gives 10.0. A mid-range error gives around 5.0. The curve is calibrated differently for each game to reflect how each sense perceives differences.
Color - perceptual color science
Color scoring uses the CIEDE2000 standard - the industry benchmark for measuring how different two colors look to a human observer. Unlike simple RGB comparisons, it accounts for how the eye is more sensitive to certain hue shifts, and how the same numerical difference looks larger in dark tones than bright ones. Two colors that score near-perfect are, in practice, at the edge of what the human eye can distinguish.
Sound - musical pitch
Pitch distance is measured in cents, the universal unit for comparing frequencies. One semitone (one key on a piano) equals 100 cents. One octave equals 1200 cents. Scoring rewards precision: trained musicians typically achieve within 10–20 cents on repeated listening. Recalling a pitch from a brief single exposure is considerably harder.
- Near-perfect - within a few cents; exceptional pitch memory
- Good - within half a semitone
- Fair - within one semitone
- Off - more than one semitone from the target
Angle - degrees
Angle error is the absolute difference in degrees between your answer and the target. The scoring threshold is tight - it roughly corresponds to the width of your thumb held at arm's length. Consistent accuracy here reflects strong spatial memory.
Brightness - luminance recall
Brightness error is the absolute difference on the 0–100 scale. The scoring threshold is calibrated so that the mid-range error represents a clearly visible difference - not a subtle one. Achieving a high brightness score requires anchoring the luminance level precisely in memory.
Score Ratings
Session scores run from 0 to 100. Here is a rough guide to what different ranges mean in practice:
| Score | Level | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 90–100 | Exceptional | Consistently at the edge of human perceptual limits |
| 75–89 | Strong | Good sensory recall, likely improving with practice |
| 55–74 | Average | Where most players start - plenty of room to grow |
| 30–54 | Below average | Likely guessing in large part; focused practice helps quickly |
| 0–29 | Beginner | Everyone starts somewhere - regular play builds the baseline |
Game Modes
Solo (Free Play)
Play at your own pace. Choose how many rounds per session, how long you get to memorize the stimulus, and how much time you have to submit your answer. Solo mode is the best way to practice and track personal improvement over time.
Daily Challenge
Every day a new challenge is published - the same stimulus for every player worldwide. Your score is recorded alongside everyone else who played that day. You get one attempt. Daily challenges are a consistent benchmark to measure yourself against.
Multiplayer
Create or join a room with up to 5 players using a short room code. All players see the same stimulus simultaneously and submit answers within a shared time limit. Scores are revealed together at the end of each round - adding competition and social pressure to the sensory recall challenge.
Tips for Improving
Use anchors
Rather than trying to hold the raw sensation in memory, attach it to a reference you already know. For sound, relate the pitch to a musical note you recognize. For color, compare it to a familiar object - "slightly more orange than a ripe lemon." For angles, think in terms of clock hands or compass directions. Anchors give your memory something structured to hold.
Verbalize what you perceive
During the memorize phase, narrate the stimulus to yourself: "deep, slightly muted teal - darker than a typical sky blue." Translating sensation into words activates a second memory channel that tends to be more durable than pure sensory recall alone over short intervals.
Calibrate with extremes
For brightness and angle, know your reference points. Brightness 0 is pitch black; 100 is full white. An angle of 90° is perfectly vertical. Position the stimulus relative to these extremes ("about 60% of the way to full brightness") rather than trying to hold an absolute value.
Short, regular sessions beat long ones
Sensory memory improves more from five short sessions spread across a week than from one long session. Your brain consolidates calibration between sessions. Consistent daily play - even just a single short session - shows measurable improvement within a few weeks.
Use headphones for Sound
Room acoustics introduce coloration that makes frequency recall harder. Headphones isolate the pure tone, making it easier to lock onto the pitch without interference.
Leaderboard and Accounts
You do not need an account to play. All games are available immediately, and your scores are saved locally in your browser. A randomly generated guest ID links your results so they can appear on the leaderboard.
Creating an account lets you log in from different devices and maintain a persistent profile across browsers. Registration requires only an email address and password, or you can sign in with Google.
The leaderboard shows top scores for each game type and mode. Daily challenge results are ranked separately, showing only scores from the current day's challenge.
About meten.app
meten.app is built and operated by Uncert Games, based in Switzerland. The name has roots in both Old High German - tracing through metten, a Bavarian place name linked to the word Mitti, meaning "middle" or "center" - and in the Dutch and Afrikaans verb meten, meaning "to measure." Both resonate with what the platform does: place you at the center of a perceptual challenge, and measure the result honestly.
Every design and scoring decision prioritizes accuracy over flattery. A score means something here.
Questions or feedback: [email protected]