Future Text Lab

This session brought together regular members and two newcomers — one joining from Mumbai, another from Moscow — for a wide-ranging exploration that moved from a live demonstration of Author on macOS and Apple Vision Pro, through a proposal for a simplified EPUB publishing format called Origami Text, and into a deep theoretical exchange on cognitive load, adaptive interfaces, and the relationship between knowledge, context, and spatial computing. The demonstration showed concept extraction, spatial node interaction, focus/unfocus gestures, and saved views in XR, while the format discussion examined how to make scholarly documents more accessible to both humans and AI by stripping EPUB back to semantic essentials and enriching it with structured metadata. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/04/28/6-may-2026/

Dave Millard is working hands-on in the Map view, testing node selection, movement, layout, and spatial organization. The conversation moves from immediate UX feedback into a deeper discussion about how AI should be integrated into the spatial workspace. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/05/02/millard-1-may-2026/

Across the four sessions of April 2026, the Future Text Lab circled a persistent and sharpening question: what, precisely, would compel someone to put on a headset and do serious knowledge work? The month opened with Frode Hegland's "Best of Both Worlds" presentation on foldable knowledge nodes in visionOS and progressed through a framework distinguishing "core" reading/writing space from "contextual" spatial surrounds, a confrontation with the Engelbart-scale question of whether the group is stuck designing mice without knowing what the mouse is for, and a concluding examination of document ownership, citation infrastructure, and the potential of ePub as a future scholarly container. A new participant, Tim Brookes of the Endangered Alphabets Project, introduced the theme of embodiment and manual skill in relation to digital abstraction. Throughout the month, generative writing — writing to discover rather than to transcribe — served as the conceptual spine connecting flat-screen authoring, spatial interaction, and AI-assisted research.

This session explored the intersection of AI in education, the crisis of academic publishing and document ownership, and the question of what a future-proof knowledge document format might look like. The conversation moved from how AI levels the playing field for students and reshapes teaching toward mastery-based learning, through the social and technical failings of current web and publishing infrastructure — siloed libraries, broken hyperlinks, pay-to-publish incentives — and arrived at a substantive design discussion about whether ePub, a new format, or enriched HTML could serve as the foundation for ownable, citable, shareable units of knowledge in a post-PDF world. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/04/27/27-april-26/

A presentation to 'Writ Large' hosted by Tim Brookes: This session of Writ Large featured a guest presentation of Author, a writing application with a spatial map feature running on Apple Vision Pro, designed to support generative writing — writing undertaken to think rather than to record what is already known. A compressed demonstration of the tool's spatial interaction model gave way to an extended group dialog that drew surprising and frequent connections between the presenter's XR work and the group's existing research into writing studies, including three-dimensional scripts, the ancient concept of ductus, embodied cognition, calligraphy, and the individuality of handwriting.

This session explored the tension between spatial movement and sedentary interaction in XR knowledge environments, the philosophical gap between incremental implementation and larger augmentation visions, and the nature of externalized knowledge and how it should be manipulated through gesture, voice, and overlay. The group discussed voice commands as an alternative interface for Author on visionOS, the concept of peripheral semantic multiplexing across mirrored displays, the role of AI as a dialogic medium for thought rather than a replacement for creative resolution, and the question of what form externalized knowledge should take when freed from flat screens. A recurring thread was the difference between designing interactions and merely executing them — and whether the community is building toward a clear enough vision of augmented thought for 2032.

This session wove together three interconnected threads: the design philosophy behind generative writing tools (specifically Author), the emerging framework of “core and contextual” writing spaces as a bridge between flat displays and XR, and the challenge of what meaningful interaction in XR actually looks like for knowledge work. The conversation moved from AI's role in education and writing practice, through the cognitive science of outlining, to a provocative closing framing: that current XR interfaces are the punch cards of their era, and the question before this community is what the equivalent of Engelbart's 1962–1968 project would look like today.

The 6 April 2026 session of the Future Text Lab was a wide-ranging exploration of what spatial knowledge nodes should look like, feel like, and be used for in XR environments. Grounded in Frode Hegland's introductory "Best of Both Worlds" presentation — which he prepared partly for Apple — the group examined the furl/unfurl paradigm for nodes in space, what granularity of content belongs in them, how thinking and publishing are fundamentally different media, and whether spatial computing has yet found its HyperCard moment. Historical predecessors from HyperCard to Zettelkasten to Hyper Words were traversed alongside live demonstrations, while the writing process itself — sketching, core-dumping, polishing — became a mirror for understanding what a spatial thinking environment should do.

This year's Symposium will be on the 14th of September, returning to London College of Communication. 'The Future of Augmented Thought"

This session brought together the Future Text Lab community to examine the cognitive science underpinning spatial text interfaces and to develop a practical design philosophy for combining traditional framed displays with XR nodal environments — specifically through Apple Vision Pro and the in-development Author application. The discussion moved from reading science and dual visual processing through to hands-on questions of what participants would actually use such a spatial knowledge environment for, probing the gap between theoretical excitement and personal necessity.

The 23 March 2026 session of the Future Text Lab gathered Frode Hegland, Tom Haymes, Brandel Zachernuk, and Peter Dimitrious for a wide-ranging discussion centred on the nature of knowledge interaction in XR — specifically what it means to navigate, manipulate, and “enter” information spatially, as distinct from reading or writing in any conventional sense. The meeting wove together a live demo of Frode’s Author spatial mapping tool on visionOS, Tom’s ongoing project to build a personal knowledge navigator from his photographed bookshelves and Kindle library, and substantial theoretical exchanges touching on flow theory, LLM output quantity, the design philosophy of Doug Engelbart, the materiality of paper, the emerging poverty of vocabulary around knowledge-in-XR, and the role of music and photography as alternative channels for entering knowledge.

This session of the Future Text Lab community centered on what host Frode Hegland called the “movement of knowledge” — the challenge of transporting and reshaping personal and scholarly knowledge from traditional 2D computing environments into XR. Frode demonstrated a working prototype that uses AI to extract defined concepts from student notes and spatialize them in Apple Vision Pro, provoking wide-ranging discussion about the nature of spatial cognition, the inadequacies of existing knowledge organization tools, the analogy of medium phase-shifts in media history, the neuroscience of memory, and what it would mean to both author and browse knowledge in three dimensions.

This session centered on annotation as a practice and a design challenge, weaving together empirical research findings, philosophical reflections on meaning-making, and speculative design ideas for how annotation infrastructure might work in spatial and digital environments. The group explored what people actually do when they annotate, why they do it, and how to build systems that honor those purposes — from e-ink tablets and PDF markup to XR-based spatial knowledge objects.

The primary thread was the relationship between XR interfaces and knowledge work, examined through two contrasting live demonstrations. Frode Hegland showed his Author system running in a headset, visualizing metadata from the ACM Hypertext 2023 conference — people, papers, locations — with selection, layout, and focus controls operated via a spatial toolbar. Ken Perlin then demonstrated two prototypes: a hierarchical Wikipedia page viewer navigable with both controllers and hand gestures, and a semantic zoom demo using Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” where walking closer to an object progressively reveals its title, full text, and analysis. Sam Brooker introduced the ACM Hypertext 2026 conference (London, September 14–18), themed around “hypertext method” — hypertext understood not just as technology but as a way of thinking: non-linear, networked, dynamic. This framing set the stage for the group’s broader inquiry into how spatial computing might serve scholarly communities.

The primary focus was Frode Hegland’s presentation of two slides posing a specific design question: when displaying a citation or quote as a node in XR, what should be shown in its closed state versus its open state, and how should different types of scholarly objects — defined concepts/glossary terms, citations (author, title, BibTeX), and quotes (citation plus text) — be visually distinguished and navigated. Frode proposed showing three lines of a quote with author and title beneath in the closed state, with full scrollable content on open, and floated the idea that node depth could encode the amount of text contained. This design question opened into a much broader discussion about context versus content in spatial environments, the nature of AI-assisted versus manual navigation, and what spatial computing can do that flat screens simply cannot.

This session ranged across the conceptual and practical challenges of making text spatial, from live demos of the Author app running on Apple Vision Pro to a sustained debate about what document format — HTML, Epub, JSON, or something new — could serve as an open interchange standard for XR-based knowledge work. The discussion was anchored by Frode Hegland’s demonstrations and framing, but branched into deep territory on foldable document metaphors, the philosophical gap between available tools and human willingness to use them, the tension between long-term standards work and short-term experimentation, and nostalgia for abandoned paradigms like OpenDoc. The meeting also touched on upcoming community events, a Wikipedia-based XR demo by Ken Perlin, and Brandel Zachernuk’s perspective on the years-long timeline required to make the spatial web a genuine standard.

The session ranged across the lived experience of working with text and knowledge artifacts in XR, the challenge of representing time in spatial environments, the emerging gestural grammar of visionOS interactions, and the broader socioeconomic responsibilities that come with building new knowledge tools. Participants debated how color, scale, and depth might encode temporal information, explored the tension between computational precision and the necessary vagueness of human knowledge, and reflected on whether technology alone can deliver on its liberating promise — or whether intentional economic and cultural thinking must accompany the tooling.

The session explored spatial authoring and XR-based knowledge environments, with Frode demonstrating a 3D knowledge map prototype derived from meeting transcripts and AI-generated glossaries, prompting a wide-ranging discussion about gestures, selection models, timelines, writing practices, and how immersive systems might augment human thinking rather than replace it.

The session explored how XR might transform reading, annotation, and meeting memory by making text spatial, embodied, and navigable, while also debating how future records of intellectual work could be queried, remixed, and preserved across time through interoperable systems, journals, notebooks, and immersive archives.

This session explored whether and how XR environments can meaningfully augment how people read, understand, and relate to complex knowledge, using a concrete but deliberately constrained experiment: presenting a single letter as a spatial, interactive object. The discussion surfaced tensions between play and utility, emotional impact and practical value, and between exploratory artistic research and task-driven design, while reaffirming the group’s shared belief that spatial interaction with information opens fundamentally new cognitive possibilities that cannot yet be fully articulated.

The session explored how a single written letter could be transformed into a spatial XR experience to demonstrate the future of text, focusing on how documents, citations, and concepts can become manipulable objects in space rather than static pages. The discussion treated XR as an exploratory, artistic medium rather than a solved HCI problem, using constraints to surface new possibilities.

Summary of our meeting on the 5th of January as analyzed and processed by Claude.