One pass of the beam
The chamber holds the CYBERLAB mark until you drop a picture in. The beam reads it in cells, and every cell becomes one dot or one character: brighter cells, bigger dots.
At the intake
The word for new tech changed again. Walk into the lab, drop in any picture and watch it get scanned into a dot-matrix cyber PFP, built live on the lab screen.
The chamber holds the CYBERLAB mark until you drop a picture in. The beam reads it in cells, and every cell becomes one dot or one character: brighter cells, bigger dots.
Specimens people chose to publish from the lab. Only the converted picture is kept, never the original.