Frode Hegland: Mark, there you are. I just sent you a little text.
Mark Anderson: I saw that. I’ll speak to you. Just turn the light on overhead lights. I’m blue. The thing with. I mean, the thing with that document is really people need to read it and ask questions if they don’t understand it, there’s nothing really to talk through. As such. It was really just to have a reference point. So if anyone’s getting confused as to sort of what they should think is happening it will, it will help. Okay. I mean, in that sense, if you know, you know, and if you don’t, you might you might make a missed presumption. That was really what I was trying to unpick. So you can skip through that. Okay.
Frode Hegland: Sorry.
Mark Anderson: I had a happy discovery. You may have seen I posted that. Turns out that I can use the Oculus three with my glasses on.
Frode Hegland: Yeah, which I did.
Mark Anderson: Which I did by mistake.
Frode Hegland: It makes a huge difference. By the way, having gone through your excellent corrections for my less than excellent thesis, one thing I’ve noticed is you follow a convention that I wasn’t aware of, of having smaller headings connect to the text. No extra space.
Mark Anderson: I apologize for that. I apologize.
Frode Hegland: Mark. No no, no, it’s good. It’s an upgrade. Yeah. But there is a known bug with the indentation. Nonsense. Yeah, because I don’t write like that. It hasn’t been my priority. But now that. No, no.
Mark Anderson: No, don’t worry. The only reason I did it was I was just trying to as I was going through, and I apologize. You want to change the font back for the titles to. Really interesting things I discovered quite by chance was that I like the warm background, but. But I found trying to find the highlights in it was giving me eyestrain. So when I changed it to gray it’s much easier. No fault there, just a, you know, chance discovery. And the other thing was by having a butt ugly font for the headings they were just easier, you know, when all I was trying to do was in edit mode rather than actually see it in its sort of esthetic layer. Hello, all.
Frode Hegland: I just. Hi, guys. Just really briefly to Mark, he’s talking about what he’s been doing in author for my thesis. Yeah. I think we should have a stronger color highlight in addition to the subtle one that actually you and I decided on. We invented that. Yeah. Right. And but when it comes to the headings on the font, I don’t need to change that back because the heading, the fonts are not encoded in the document point.
Mark Anderson: In fact, funny enough, very quickly on that thing about different color, my my one of the I a letter, I was a note I’m writing for you at the moment, which sort of sort of some reflections on you getting spending a lot of time actually in author was that to a certain extent, something unsurprisingly, which sort of isn’t. There are things that are you really only need when you’re editing rather than writing. Absolutely. And it’s, you know, and they’re not there because that wasn’t the original focus. So let’s not go down that rabbit hole now. But I have some suggestions on that.
Frode Hegland: Guys. You, you who are early. You want to see my entire room? Okay, I know you’re excited, right? That’s my bad. That’s my sink. That’s my desk.
Peter Wasilko: Where’s your toilet?
Frode Hegland: There is a toilet and shower room around the corner. But it doesn’t even really old school. The sink and the sink had to fit here. Sorry, I have to replug the power or something, so I think that’s pretty strange, but there you go.
Mark Anderson: Well, you’re not. At least you’re not in one of those capsule things.
Dene Grigar: I’m going to say you could be in a you could be in, like, the Neuromancer capsule that Johnny or Johnny Monix capsule and.
Fabien Benetou: Perfect way to use the.
Dene Grigar: Novels.
Frode Hegland: I felt like that on the flight over when I was sitting with the headset, I recorded some videos that I may upload of the experience sitting there with the beautiful mountains of Hawaii. I have my thing there and working, and then since I only did it 180, then I look over to Emily and Edgar like, hey, that’s so bizarre. We are living in the future, not necessarily the future we wanted. However, I Peter.
Dene Grigar: I say that every time I have to change a password, I get to author the two factor authentication. It’s like, this is not what I signed up for.
Frode Hegland: No. Exactly.
Mark Anderson: Well, it’s interesting, the new thing about Passphrases, because when I read an interesting article the other day saying, you know, be very careful because this is a new way to lose everything, because if you don’t know where your passphrase is you everything disappears to a dot in the middle of the screen. You don’t get it back.
Frode Hegland: Yeah. Well. That’s good. All right, Andrews.
Dene Grigar: Can I mention something else? We forgot to put on the announcements. Photo is the book club. The Monday morning book club.
Frode Hegland: Do that right now.
Dene Grigar: And I and I want to report quickly, Mark, that I’ve been looking for a free copy of Cyberspace First Steps by Benedict. And it’s not free. It’s all to be purchased. I’m not seeing anything free. And it would be the chapter that we mentioned, which is about persistence. So if you can help me track one down. And if not, then I’ll have to find something else to read.
Peter Wasilko: The Internet Archive pages.
Dene Grigar: It’s a long chapter
Peter Wasilko: The Internet Archive might have had it floating in there. Try searching and archive.org.
Dene Grigar: All right. Well, you know, I thought so, but I didn’t see it. But let me look again.
Frode Hegland: Hello, Andrew.
Peter Wasilko: Well, being there at one point. But they might take notice.
Mark Anderson: For what it’s worth, I have a paper copy that doesn’t actually help anyone who doesn’t have one, but I do have one for which I can blame Peter. About a year or two ago, when we first started discussing it.
Dene Grigar: I’m not. Yeah, I’m not finding it for free, so I’ll find something that’s close to that. It was a hundred pages, so it would be. It’s going to be a long read, but it’s a hundred good pages.
Frode Hegland: Japan is calling Brussels.
Fabien Benetou: Brussels go Brussels to the world. Assuming it’s for completely legal purposes and research and whatnot. Anna’s archive is a compilation. Of Libgen. Sci-hub a lot of different digital libraries that contain, from research articles to comics, mostly in English, but even in other languages, it’s it’s like one petabyte of data. It’s it’s the biggest archive of digital content, mostly books and research papers that I’ve seen so far.
Dene Grigar: Well, I’ve been searching in and not finding anything about virtual reality in it. So please, if you do better than me, please do. But But yeah. Internet archive, the Wayback Machine is we’re using that in the lab for all of our preservation.
Fabien Benetou: Not Internet Archive. Anna’s archive. Like the the name. Anna.
Frode Hegland: Can you give a link in the chat, please? Fabian?
Fabien Benetou: Yes. I’ll put a link to your pirate websites in case that wasn’t obvious. So that’s why. Hence the legal and whatnot. Warning ahead of all this recording of your moral or ethical framework. So I’ll put a link thinking.
Mark Anderson: Of that and because something that spun past me and I don’t have to hand, I should note it down was a link on Twitter or some guy, basically did one of these AI prompts and he asked for sad girl seeing the, the what is it, the MIT license conditions? It’s quite fun. And it made me I mean, because it’s a bit like this, I don’t know if you’ve come across this. It’s a it’s a visual novel. Every page is in the style of a different sort of cartoon sort of Tintin or whatever. And it’s the Apple terms and conditions. So the book is the terms and conditions from start to finish, but each spread is a different in the style of a different cartoonist. But it is amusing listening to. It’s basically someone just singing their way through at a piano in a rather sort of down mood about the MIT license conditions, which I thought was a delightful waste of technology.
Frode Hegland: And now I know what I want for Christmas. Right? So onto the agenda. But before the agenda, I just want to thank Dini for something specific. And that is having Dini and Andrew and I’ve gone through this intense dialog via email over the last few days. And, you know, because we’re fighting for the same thing, which is the best kind of thing. And Dini, I want to go on recorded record to say, I would much rather fight with you in the good sense, then work with anybody else who just doesn’t care. Your passion is amazing. I am so grateful to have to argue with you to get something done, rather than to pull someone along, so that’s really important. So from the other side of the world. Thank you. And now following the fighting. Sorry. What?
Dene Grigar: I love fighting. Actually, I like biting. I decided I’m a biter, not a fighter.
Frode Hegland: Yeah, I mean, look, look, look. You know, our different communities over so many years. You know, people do things, and then they don’t do things, and you really do things, and I’m very grateful. Right? So please reload the. The agenda if you haven’t already done so, because I added a thing that I forgot about. The first thing was just a joke. Tiny room, as you’ve seen. I’m sitting here. It’s fantastic. Tiny room. And then tiny.
Dene Grigar: The Murdock meet is tomorrow at 4:00, and what I plan to do is finalize the contract for the symposium. And I’m hoping to do it for two years. And just wrap it up for two years, right? But I’m also wanting to do is once I get that contract finalized, I can start looking at what it’s going to cost for the different kinds of food options, like coffee and, you know, food in the morning, breakfast stuff, treats it around ten, lunch treats in the afternoon and then the evening. And so the there’s like 4 or 5 caterers that work with Murdoch that I can choose from. But I’d like to put together a cost for each of those and then hit up some of my contacts to sponsor those. So this is sponsored by Noctua. And you know Frodo, you met Nathan from Noctua. You know, this is sponsored by, you know, Eric Price’s company. So what can I you know, what would it cost to get these these sponsorships? And then that would save us $3,500, which I would like to use for the dinner. Right. It’s going to cost that much for food. So that’s the plan. And and then once we get one more thing is once we get this lined up, the contract lined up, then we can send out formal invitations to people. We want to be there. And know that I’ve done this is like the seventh conference I’ve done or symposium I’ve done in my career. And I find that if I invite people with formal limitations, they will come because they they not necessarily to be a speaker, but to be a featured guest. The other thing is I’m looking at an NSF grant for conferences that would maybe pay for people to travel so we could pay for folks to come. And they would be the featured guests, not necessarily speakers. But anyway, that’s what I’m I’m in the middle of doing right now.
Frode Hegland: Thank you, Danny, obviously, for doing all that grunt work and charming people work. In terms of the the food, I only have one requirement. That it is slightly different. Because people seem to. The food is important. Obviously you agree, but what I mean is when you look at all these different things, something, you know, local and different, fantastic, because people seem to remember what they were eating. Do you guys have the same experience? I mean, do you remember the Italian place in Germany? All right. There’s something special about having a meal that’s not a standard. It’s just so, so lovely. Anyway, detail.
Mark Anderson: I thought you were going to say when you turn the food over, I must say what it is on the bottom. Inedible.
Dene Grigar: Well, here’s the thing that I will say to all of.
Frode Hegland: You 3D print that Mark.
Dene Grigar: If you’ve not been to the Pacific Northwest, we have a cuisine style called Farm to Table. If you’ve ever watched Portlandia, which I highly recommend, there is an episode in which a person, a couple, goes into a restaurant and they start to look at the menu and it says, the eggs in this dish were from Farmer Bob’s farm, two miles down the street the chicken comes from. And then they go, let’s I want to see that chicken. And they get up out of the restaurant and go to the farm, and they talk to the chickens. Right. I think the.
Peter Wasilko: Chicken’s name was.
Frode Hegland: Keith.
Dene Grigar: Yeah. But that to me, I mean, just to say that is how we roll here on menus here. There’s like, the lettuce comes from Betty’s house. You know, the we’ve grown these herbs in the backyard of our restaurant. I mean, it’s it’s very goofy and quaint. That said, that means the food will be very special. Yeah.
Peter Wasilko: No. Perfect.
Frode Hegland: That’s perfect.
Dene Grigar: I was will not be. It will not be the normal stuff, I promise. Excellent.
Frode Hegland: Excellent and wonderful. Right. So then the second next thing is what I missed out on because I did this thing called sleep. The book club.
Dene Grigar: Well, I’ll let someone else report about book club because I had a good time. But Mark and and and Peter, what do you think of book club?
Peter Wasilko: Really enjoyed it.
Mark Anderson: First rule of book club, you know.
Frode Hegland: Apparently Fight Club is about coming out as gay. I didn’t know that until TikTok this week. I really think we should do more of that of the book club, to really separate the let’s build to what the hell is happening, so we should try to figure out a better balance.
Dene Grigar: Well, we’re spending an hour looking at the historical document I thought was useful. And if we continue down that vein to see, like what was proposed, like what was VR like in 1991, what’s it like now and what what’s the difference and why? Where did we mess up? I’ve been thinking. Yeah. And I’ve been thinking more and more about this and thinking about how much I missed the 70s and how 70 movies are, to me are the best films ever. You know, Midnight Cowboy, Bonnie and I mean, Bonnie and Clyde was at the cusp of the 70s. Oh, godfathers one and two. Apocalypse Now. I mean, the best movies in America came in the 70s. And the question I asked myself last night in my sleep and my insomnia was why? And that’s the same thing I ask about the VR. What made it so potent in the 90s? You know, and you were posting about Max headroom Peter, which was so much fun, right? Yes. You know, and Neuromancer, you know, 1984. So there’s just so much, so much richness.
Mark Anderson: There, perhaps partly at the time it was due that it was partly it was just that little bit further from what we could actually do. So it was close to a certain whereas we’re in this, this position now where it’s sort of possible. And except that it’s not quite possible in the as we imagine it, in other words. So we’re at the bit where we’re actually doing the technology now to make it work, but it sort of exists, whereas before it didn’t quite exist apart from some, you know, very, very early tests. So there was more scope for the, for the in a sense, it’s a bit like the old joke about the radio, you know, the pictures are far more vivid. So because it wasn’t there, you you could you could color it a bit better yourself.
Dene Grigar: Yeah. And so I think the next we’re looking at Benedict’s chapter from his book First Steps, which we talked about persistence. So if I can find a free copy of that, if I can scan it maybe at school today I’m going to go up there. But it’s a hundred pages. It’ll take a while to scan it, but I may find something else anyway. So that’s that.
Mark Anderson: Sounds like an assignment for somebody that, you know, that’s that’s not very difficult, you know, won’t take you very long.
Peter Wasilko: Sorry, I paid them too.
Dene Grigar: Much money to scan.
Frode Hegland: My screen is so small I’m going to have to use the analog finger. Otherwise I can’t see anything. Oh.
Peter Wasilko: I just dropped. I just dropped a link to the classic historical documents clip. Yes, in a side chat.
Frode Hegland: One of the best movies ever. It was something that may be pertinent. Someone explained to me that fashion is an expression of what people don’t have at that time. So in the 50s when everything was rubble, people wanted simple elegance, etc. so I’m wondering how that applies to Zver in the 90s. What didn’t we have that we dreamt about and what is it today we don’t have that we dream about? So the fashion of technology, I.
Dene Grigar: Would say, Frodo, I think it’s freedom. I mean, we’re so confined. This is what I was thinking about last night when I was writing the the next part of the case study, which we’re going to talk about later. We’re so confined by space and then we’re confined by two factor authorization. So access I mean it’s just so confining. Okay. Oh yeah.
Frode Hegland: Metadata I get you. Yeah. Fabian.
Fabien Benetou: Yeah, I, I think we have actually so many opportunities in term of actual freedom, at least most of us in the place, at least we’re connecting from both politically, artistically and in terms of technology. I think we just I’m going to annoy everyone, but I think we’re just lazy, like we prefer to just consume what exists rather than create. But I don’t see it as a as a lack of means. I think it’s to me and I’m not criticizing others. Like I also consume stuff like from videos to video games to books to whatever. And yeah, from from hackerspace to makerspace, from 3D printer to VR to like, even you can paint with gold or whatever you want. It’s, it’s it’s more like the overwhelmingness of the possibilities or whatever excuse we can come up with. But I tend to think that freedom is again in the privileged positions were in it’s it’s not what I find to be a constraining resource in such cases.
Frode Hegland: So really interesting to hear that come up today. I was just in China for a few days. And it was really interesting because. The freedom there is very different, right? If I wanted to access Google, I had to use my phone. The hotel Wi-Fi wouldn’t do it. The the Great Firewall keeps some things out, but depending on the media you can get some of them right. So that’s a little funny thing. There were so many goddamn cameras everywhere. Even Edgar noticed it. It was like flower pots of cameras. These cameras were not just towards us, but there were many soldiers standing to attention, you know, like this really rigid. And some important train stations. They had cameras, special cameras at them to make sure they were on duty. Right. So there was that layer of complete being watched. You couldn’t pay for anything with a credit card. You had to use the Wii Pay or whatever. So Emily did all that right. But at the same time, the there was a huge amount of personality. It wasn’t like everybody was being uniform there. More uniform in Japan, you know, people looked different and there was so much public displays of affection.
Frode Hegland: People were touching each other, kissing each other all over the place, even Tiananmen Square. So you kind of have to wonder if there is an equilibrium when people have certain opportunities or not, what else they choose to do. I’m I’m not for censorship, but I’m wondering if I was the boss of a billion people. You know, would I want them necessarily to have what we had in the United Kingdom with the Brexit discussion kind of thing? I’m not saying we should start talking about that now, but the very notion of what freedom is. Is a hugely interesting thing. It isn’t One Direction, it isn’t one thing. Like, as an example, the freedom to carry a gun is the opposite of the freedom from being shot, right? So when we’re talking about the interactions we’re building and the freedoms we’re talking about, I really hope we can have extremely open discussions on that, because Danny pointed out that freedom of interaction and also the freedom of putting things in place. Sorry, I just been thinking a lot about freedom over the last few days.
Dene Grigar: Well, another way to think about.
Peter Wasilko: It is hang.
Frode Hegland: On. Fabian quoted me that I am for some censorship, I absolutely am. Right? Right, right. Now on on Twitter, there is so much of both Ukraine and Gaza. You can see people getting blown to bits, not necessarily in great detail, but I’m not sure if that’s helping the discourse, etc.. Right. In the olden days, we had more traditional censorship where you don’t show things to kids at a certain time that was accepted. But in what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to give almost absolute academic freedom. Right? That’s a very specific freedom. And I mean academic in the broad sense, knowledge, work and all of that stuff.
Dene Grigar: Marginalization and repression and all the things that happen in societies like even in the United States, China, Russia, East Germany causes. Reactions for people to either become more. Mr.. And my family in Czechoslovakia during the. During the occupation. They were very insular. They were afraid to talk to anybody. And when my mother would visit, my her cousin would take her out very far away from anything to even have a conversation. Right. So it caused them to be very some people become very insular. In some cases, it causes people to to look for companionship. Right. And in speaking about my own program, we were marginalized when I first got here for a good five years, and it caused our faculty to coalesce so deeply. We’re so deeply connected. It’s not it’s not like a normal department. Right. And and we’re not just close friends, but we’re like comrades in arms, like we were in the trenches fighting, fighting. So we know how to. We know how to fight together. And when something happens, we immediately come together to fight. And that’s just, you know, the six people on my campus, in my department and others. And so it just causes different reactions.
Frode Hegland: Yeah, absolutely.
Dene Grigar: So shall we get on? So, the book club. I’ll figure something out today and get back with all of you.
Frode Hegland: Yeah, I mean, I yeah, that’s just great. The next item is just a special face time because on the weird meeting on Monday. Weird timing. Rob was there. He put on his headset, I put on my headset, and we did the specialized FaceTime call, and it was amazingly effective. It’s got some interesting constraints in the reality, but what I had Rob, there, I was just like, can you move back a bit? You know, it was that level of immersion or presence. Rather.
Dene Grigar: I actually called you to see if you would FaceTime with me and you didn’t answer. So I guess you were either, you know, traveling or something.
Frode Hegland: Well, not necessarily. My mother tried to call me a few times today and she never got through, so it may be because I’m only on Wi-Fi, certain things don’t connect. But yeah, we’ll we should all try that when we can. Any other announcements? Have you had a chance, guys, to look at Denny’s use cases document? Dina, you want to.
Dene Grigar: Yeah. So let me let me pull it up real fast. It’s right here. Some stuff out of the way. Pulling it up on my Big Mac. So what I’ve done so far is I’ve written the part one. And part one focuses on kind of basic constraints and experience in affordances right now. And it talks about the how much how much stuff I’m using. Right. And there’s a picture of me sitting there with all my devices. What I wrote. Also that I haven’t posted yet is what I’m calling the interlude. And the question I asked myself, and I think all of you are. I mean, when I listen to Leon, I read Leon’s message about I can’t do anything on my phone. And yet I look at my students in class and Andrew, you know, that they can create an entire 2D animation on an iPad. I can’t friggin do that. I can’t think in a small space. I feel so confined. But they can they can create on their phones and they’re doing incredible work on their phones. So the question is, is it just age? Is it just that or is it some other things? And for me, it’s it’s about the kind of space I was afforded when I was young. Right. And now in in the interlude, I talk about how I. I grew up in the middle of cattle land in Texas. The total stereotype that you read about or see on in the news, right, or in film with thousands of acres and cattle and horses and, you know, snakes and javelina, hogs and all those things. And as a child, I was allowed to run wild. There was no people.
Dene Grigar: There’s no danger except snakes, right? Or maybe chart being charged by a bull. But I knew how to handle myself. And I would go out every day, you know, in good weather and just wander. And what I think the most important thing was, is that because it’s Texas and it’s pasture land, it was flat. It was like pancake, and you could see the horizon and the and nothing broke my view. And I could look across a wide 360 degrees of nothingness and its further out I would get. I wouldn’t even see my house right? I saw nothing but cattle and land. And the that shaped the way I think about the world anyway. So the world is boundless. The world is open. It’s you should be able to go and do. And I began traveling alone as a young woman in the in the early 80s. Six weeks in France by myself in the 80s, I can’t. Now, looking back, I think I must have been out of my fucking mind. Right? Going to Japan by myself. Brought up. Women don’t sit in restaurants by themselves in Japan. There I was, right in the 2000. And But I’ve done a lot of traveling. I just feel like the world should be open and free, boundaryless unfettered. And so I write in my head. So just to tell you, I that case study, I didn’t write on paper until after it was written in my head. Then, and only if it was written, did I drop it on that piece of paper and edit it. Then I began looking at moving things around, cutting some things, the editing part, but the actual writing, the composition happened in my head.
Dene Grigar: And all my writing is that way. Every book, every article 100 and whatever of those things I’ve done. And so I think there’s a lot of there’s a lot of particular particularity in my case study that maybe doesn’t pertain to other people, which is why I encourage other people to to add to their add to case studies. At the same time, there’s things that are pretty common, the activities themselves are common. And what the second part then goes into is. I have all of this here because I need this space. But what I want is more space. This is not enough. I want 360. I don’t, I don’t want I mean, I don’t mind little pieces of paper of things I’m reading. I don’t want to write on a fucking piece of paper. I want it to just be out there and then I edit it. You know, I want Siri to to I want to be able to talk to Siri and let Siri put my thoughts down on paper. And then I edit. So it’s those kinds of things that are in part to. That might help us think about what we should be able to have, and maybe some of these things we’re already having, right? We already have some of these things in place with the Apple Vision Pro some of it is 20 years or two years or five years down the road. And so I’m whittling down the parts to two instead of three, so that part two and three are combined. And there’s just a little interlude that introduces part two. So that’s where I’m headed with the case study. Comments, questions, opposing viewpoints.
Frode Hegland: I was just writing a note there. Yeah. Fabian. Please go.
Fabien Benetou: Yeah, I think the I think people who did have the privilege, not just of writing on a whiteboard or blackboard even just the na4 piece of paper is difficult. It’s it feels constraining. It’s same like playing with post-its. I think a lot of people have a hard time coming back from it. And even when you go back to digital, that should give you so many more opportunities for a lot of people that once they had this one big thing in place and the ability modularly even though imperfect, like even if you end up with chalk on your hand or stains even of the markers on, on your shoulders or whatnot, it’s still like it works. So I think, yeah, most people who did not just like, forced as a kid because the teacher asked you to go in front of everyone and get some kind of trauma out of it. But when you have actually like, your like, it’s an anecdote, but I had some I was doing some post-grad in knowledge management in Brazil and, and I had to summarize a set of documents. And I to be honest, I prepared because I read all the documents, but I did not prepare the answer. And I basically synthesized the answer on, on the blackboard doing kind of mind map.
Fabien Benetou: And that was a moment and that was also commented by by the people that was presenting to and the professor then it’s. Like it’s a process in itself. It’s not just like writing on a blackboard or on a big thing. It’s like it helps you to think. It’s an affordance. It brings back. And it’s in so many things that it’s. Yeah, you can’t just have this for now or arguably other ways, but I think, yeah, that’s the to me, to be honest, to me, that’s, that’s the kind of like that’s what’s driving me not just having this, but having a lot more of those, like an infinite number of those that can be rearranged. But until we have, like, new affordances that make chalk feels like outdated or passé. Yeah. It’s that little magical moment. I think that that must be not just reenacted, but even facilitated. I don’t have answers on how I think. If we keep on pushing, though lots of little explorations. I don’t want to say we’re bound to find it, but I would hope so if if it’s done efficiently, I. Yeah, I don’t know if a better.
Frode Hegland: Absolutely.
Peter Wasilko: Okay. I sort of view the research process as almost like I’m a detective, and as I’m going through different sources, I find little breadcrumbs, and that’s why I think of them as breadcrumbs. And it’ll be maybe a reference to some corporation I’ve never heard of before. Or I’ll suddenly realize that there’s a connection between two bodies of writing, for instance. Back when I was like an undergrad, I was reading some of Noam Chomsky’s work in linguistics, and in a few years later, I came across some of his political writings, like Noam Chomsky. This is a completely different subject. Is this the same Noam Chomsky? And that sent me on, like a little biographical burrowing? Oh, yes. Well, you know, it’s the same person. He’s active in two completely different fields of knowledge management and, you know, and the book bios of either genre, you wouldn’t necessarily pick up that this is the same Noam Chomsky as in the other area. Then I had my highlighter phase and that was like as an undergraduate, I got into highlighting. First I was just using the yellow marker. Then I thought, well, gee, if yellow marker is good, what can I do if I use the pink, blue and green markers and I highlight based upon the nature of the quotation, then I wound up with my books were almost like doubled in weight from the weight of the highlighter ink soaking through all the pages, and I realized it was utterly useless coming back to that material afterwards, through the act of highlighting, I’d actually destroyed the utility of working with the book because I made such a mess of it in the process, and what seemed salient at the time wasn’t necessarily salient in reflection.
Peter Wasilko: Having read a few more chapters on beyond where I was when I was initially highlighting And that got me to have this very strong desire for clean white pages. However, maybe 2 or 3 times I would encounter a used volume that had actually been marked up by someone who was competent. The vast majority of used books are marked up by blithering idiots who just highlight everything. Or or you’ll get the pattern of. The amount of highlighting declines with the passage of pages, and then, after about 30 pages in the book, is pristine from that point out. And you realize that whoever was marking up probably simply gave up and threw the thing on the side at that point.
Dene Grigar: Can I respond to something, Peter, real fast? When I was in graduate school, one of the professors I took a course from the after the first day of class, he took he he said, okay, I want you to all turn in your books to me. And then you’re like seven people in the class. So it was not like a heavy load. And we said, why? And he says, I want to see what you highlighted. He said. Your grade depends on if you highlighted and if you highlighted the right things, and I get to determine what that is. And he did. He took up our books and would write in the margins. This is asinine. Why would you even underline something like this? This is not important information, you know. Or or this should have been underlined where, you know, where’s your brain today? And and then he passed the books back the next seminar session. And then, you know, of course, we read for the next week and we’re all freaked out about what we underlined and didn’t. But it’s such an interesting activity, right? I’m sorry. I had. I just had to tell you that.
Peter Wasilko: But then it was a couple few that were highlighted by a competent person actually had useful pointers to other works. And then I started thinking, now how the heck could I properly cite this? I’m dealing with one particular copy of a book, and what matters to me is what some past reader, whose identity is completely unknown to me, was writing in the margin of the book. Yeah. How do I properly enter this into the body of literature that some unknown person who’d walk this way before had a brilliant insight? It’s not my insight, so I can’t take credit for it, but I can’t cite who it was. And I’m dealing with, you know, a non serialized book. It would be wonderful if each book had printed in a serial number so that you could identify that particular physical artifact if something gets added to it. Yeah.
Frode Hegland: Hum. Peter, this is so crucially important. I’m after Andrew. I’m showing a few slides today. There’s one slide addressing this. I’m not saying it’s an answer, but addressing it. So this is definitely a worthwhile topic for ongoing conversation.
Peter Wasilko: And thinking about it and thinking about the Chomsky issue had me start looking at authority control in library collections. And we really need something like that. But for ordinary end users, you shouldn’t have to be a registered member of the Mach consortium to get the Mach authority control application to start doing that. It’s relevant to me. We’re in a boutique community, so we could start certainly start teasing out the authority. Links between people and some names are so bloody common that even having a Library of Congress authority record catalog is next to useless, because okay, now here we have all of these different start and death dates for 1000. John Smith’s out there and. We don’t have the metadata to distinguish what each of those John Smiths was necessarily writing about. Short of trying to physically track down the books that should be in the authority record, and we should have something flexible that ordinary end users could be working with. And the same thing for hunches. That’s another thing that’s always bothered me, that we don’t document hunches. Sometimes I get a hunch, an instinct, and I would like to be able to record and make the instinct which might be wrong, a part of the record. And I’ve seen a couple of papers in some conferences. Every once in a while, you’ll see a conference that says write up a short submission for we’re going to be doing a panel session. And the topic of this panel session is what I believe, but I can’t prove. And those usually are real golden gems and highlights of a conference program. So I think.
Dene Grigar: The hypertext conference. Right. Mark. Blue sky.
Speaker6: Yeah. Yep. Well.
Mark Anderson: Best part at the moment.
Frode Hegland: I mean, just really, really briefly because we’ll because Mark is up and we’re going to cover this a little bit later. This is actually critical to visual meta because Dini last time we had a Wednesday a week ago, you talked about tearing things off, tearing things off, who did the tearing thing off? And can other people access your tearing things off? I would love to open a book by Dini where you have not just underlined, but you have torn things up and I open it in multiple space. So this is a really, really powerful direction for us to discuss that layering. Mr. Mark.
Mark Anderson: I just it’s picking up, really responding to sort of Dean’s original question about, you know, how people had looked through the book. I have, and I put some comments into the slack. And amazingly, just because if anyone thought I didn’t know how to use a highlighter, I did put some highlights in and a couple of things that sprung off the page and I which sort of linked back to what you were saying about your expectation of a workspace and juxtaposing that with what people of a different generation to you do and things. And something that sort of sang to me off the page is that it’s only after I correct the information, I can turn my attention to editing the evaluation of the work. That’s very much something I accord with. It’s probably sort of, I mean, experienced training, I don’t think. I don’t think it has to be that way. That’s certainly what I do. I mean, I really can’t see the article until I’ve got all the all the bad formatting out of the way because it stands it, it destroys the communication of the author. But I think what, what one is able to do is partly practice and concentration. So if I spent all day making TikToks or something and probably not doing very much else because I didn’t have any work to do, I didn’t have the things to do or things to talk. No, no, no, that’s not the point I’m making. I mean, the thing is, there are people doing things to crikey, that’s amazing. And they did that on a phone. But I think, you know, I think back to my day job when in my 20s and the sheer amount of information, you know, it used to drive around at full speed with no lights, flying aircraft, doing all sorts of stuff and not killing anyone. And.
Speaker6: You know.
Mark Anderson: But, you know, it’s a similar sort of thing. It involved a massive amount of skill. Could I do it again? Probably, yes. But, you know, to get to that level of competence took a year of almost constant, constant activity. And if you were to see the person you were prone to doing the PowerPoints, I wonder if you saw them in ten years time whether they still be doing that or that particular thing. So there’s an it’s part I don’t think it’s a generational thing. I think what we individually do is, is definitely a product of experience. And things that we see as absolute red line things in reality, certainly for each of us individually, are not necessarily to the to to the wider to the wider audience.
Frode Hegland: My hand dropped.
Speaker6: Sorry.
Mark Anderson: And then when it does that yes. The, the other very interesting thing that you said and I, I call with this, this thing of we do become very dependent on electronic affordances and I, I, like you noticed that I’m very careful when I’m editing stuff as to whether I’m reading us English or British English or indeed sort of international English in terms of what I consider would be correct spelling because you’re trying to be true to the author and at the same time, to be true to the thing. So often different parts of the document will indeed conform to different, different rules. And I, you know, had I facility in other languages, I would attempt to attempt to do the same in those as well. I mean, it’s again, it’s all about courtesy to the reader. If your aim is to inform and the best you can do is to leave them with fewer questions as to what that looks all wrong. And the last thing I picked up on was the is your point about about printing out, which reminded me that a thing I often would hear early stage graduate students saying, well, why do I have to, you know, print? Why do I have to write things for so much space? And then explain to them, well, that’s because somebody else needs to, in whatever form, whether on paper or digital, whatever, actually has got to write somewhere in between. They have to have somewhere to put the annotations. And that’s an interesting observation in the sense that for all the digital stickies and things we have, it’s annotation is still not necessarily particularly easier. I mean, you can make marks on things, but the getting to the end point where the annotations done finished and in a form useful either to your future self or to another person, I don’t think is necessarily moved that far forward. And but I don’t claim to have any answers at that point. I think I should let somebody else speak. Yeah.
Dene Grigar: I want to respond to that. So nature and opportunity, John. You know, John and I’ve been married for 25 years. He grew up in the mountains in Asheville, North Carolina. And so if you ever have been to Asheville, North Carolina, you can’t look anywhere without being obstructive obstructed. Your view is constantly being obstructed by plants, trees, mountains. I mean, it’s very confining, just like it is here. It’s very I can’t. Look out my window and see anything but trees, which is great, but I can’t see the horizon at all. And from any window in my house. And even if I walked outside and went on my run, I couldn’t see it. So John John’s personality is very confined. He he is a very he he when he sees the world, he sees it like this. Which is totally opposite of me. I’m like, let’s go, you know, let’s, let’s try this. And he’s like, no, no, you know, and I, I think I laughingly say, we are our geography. We’re so in in inculcated. With our geography, our upbringing, our, you know, our opportunities. And then I mentioned here, I’m, I’m mildly dyslexic, which in those days, you know, I’m 69, so that didn’t even exist as a possibility when I was six years old. But because of the fact I like to read, I could start to. Figure out what words were. You know, the problem I’m having is Uays look like three’s words bounce. Everything seems to be moving on the screen, constantly wiggling.
Frode Hegland: Danny, did you write the PDF text extraction engine? Because that’s what happened. I copied from your PDF and a lot of the A’s were fours.
Dene Grigar: I’m sure. But M’s and N’s, I can’t tell them apart. I mean, there’s so anyway, I began doing crossword puzzles when I was six because that helped me predict what letters. So now I just look at some things and figure it out, right? And I can read like like the wind. I’ve been a reader all my life. But I think it’s important to think about how each person has their own particularities. And so my case study is very specific to me. And it’s and it’s not necessarily generational. Right. It’s because of the space I was allowed to have. And and it is I mean, the students today don’t have big desktops at home. They can’t afford this Macintosh, the $600 or $200, $300 phone that they’ve got is all they can afford, and they’ve got to do everything on it. So it’s a lot of about money and opportunity and that kind of thing, which I think is really important. So.
Frode Hegland: Is that your cat?
Dene Grigar: That was John asking me if I left my my Bored at school and the answer is no.
Frode Hegland: Oh, I thought it was your cat. My cat.
Dene Grigar: Did bite me. So he’s down on the floor right now.
Frode Hegland: So I only have very brief comments on this. And one of them is our species grew up in the forest. We didn’t grow up working on tiny rectangles. So clearly our physical affordances are definitely where we’re talking about the fact that culturally, we’ve gone all over the place over the last few decades is important. And of course, we’re trying to smash that. We grew up in a 360 jungle. And also, as Denny mentioned to me in the pre call meeting we had today, guys, if you have a case study that you want listed, listed, right. If you email it to me, obviously post it on slack or whatever. But you know, whatever you do, if I’m notified, I’m trying to do distill the case study things into specific affordances. So that means that when people in the community try to design things. And that’s another thing. If you want to do more design, please do. At least we’re not just designing for completely relevant things. We as a community, over time decide what these things are. Yeah, that was it. From this side, I think.
Speaker6: Oops. Sorry, my.
Frode Hegland: Tiny desktop is very confusing.
Speaker6: Where Andrew.
Dene Grigar: Introduced me to 360 Beat Saber. And I can’t tell you.
Speaker6: Yeah, the woman won the chick.
Dene Grigar: The chick game that I love so much. But it’s a 360 environment now, and I’m just I mean, it’s it’s it’s exactly what I want. Right. And so it’s.
Speaker6: Oh, okay.
Frode Hegland: On the 360. So my experience with the author is relevant here. We have a fully functioning author for vision if you don’t already have it. If you have a vision headset, buy it. I’ll buy you a coffee. It’s too difficult to do things there anyway. It really is, as Dini would say, a forward. It’s a 360, but it’s a forward up because you kind of have to use a keyboard. But that’s author, not necessarily a reading thing. But one of the things I realized only this evening is that we have no undo. The virtual keyboard doesn’t have a command key. Or a button for undo. And when I speak to Siri, undo. She repeats, I don’t know which message to Unsend. I don’t know which you know. So Siri doesn’t understand the application that’s in front of her, which is a really important thing in our context. So I’m going to have to add, you know, en I iOS when you select text, you get a little contextual menu right on there. I’m going to have to make the first item say undo. Because one of the things is when something is true, the exact opposite is often true too. So when Dean is talking about the whole 360 space, also the most precious resource you have, even in XR, you know when you’re reading and writing is really small, really, really small, right? So to be able to use a focused space and a wider space is really, really important.
Frode Hegland: And another thing that I realized just before the call, I didn’t even write it down, actually. Maybe I did. Whatever. Peter often talked about memory palaces, and I think they’re useful, but there may also be a distilled version of what I might call trigger spaces. You know, I was supposed to call my mother today because Edgar is not. Well, I completely forgot. I’m on TikTok waiting for you guys. Just emptying my brain. There is a song, Bohemian Rhapsody. Mother. Oh, damn. I got a call. My mother, that kind of thing. If. Imagine if we have, like, a wall of things that inspire us. You know, it might be just random phrases or pictures or whatever that we know are core to what we do. So when we get stuck in work, we just pull that wall up or room. As. Oh, right. And then we’ll move on. There’s so many things that can be in space for us that is more ambient, and you pull it in when you need this. I think that could be an interesting future.
Dene Grigar: I do want to mention one more thing. I’m. I have eidetic memory, which is helpful. Right? So it was determined when I was about six years old that I have a, what they call it photographic memory. So I can read something and tell you exactly word for word, what I read and what page number it showed up on it and it freaked my parents out. So they took me to the doctor to see what was wrong with me, had me totally checked out because they thought I was intellectually problematic. And but the doctor told my parents that it was a thing called photographic memory and it would cause me to be a stupid person all my life because I’d rely on my memory. And so I always I was very pissed when I heard that when I was six years old. But it’s actually been a quite a superpower, right? Made me a lot of money when I waited tables because I remember people’s names. I can remember my students names, you know, in a room of 100, I can pick it up in a in a day. But it does. It does. Also come in handy when you’re writing to be able to pull things together and remember where things are. So, you know, things on the shelf and knowing exactly what page to pull up when I’m doing a work.
Frode Hegland: So that’s interesting because my memory is absolute awful. However, I do remember where something is in a book on what side of the page for sure. You know, that’s the minimum. And when you now you’re also raising a huge issue, which is very Android related. You know, where things are in space. If you’re flying an aircraft, you get muscle memory because it’s in the same place. But when you’re doing knowledge work and you put a thing here and you put a thing there, it’s pertinent for that time. So how to make that glanceable so you don’t have to read everything if it happens to be a snippet of text, you know, how do we do that? You know, do we do color coding, shaping other things very much related to what Andrew is doing in his space, which we’re getting to quite soon.
Mark Anderson: I just quickly it’s interesting what you just say, because I was thinking in terms of the sort of knowledge work that I’ve done for the last 20, 30 years, there’s a definite sort of well, it’s not spatial, but there is that sort of almost like a spatial memory of it. Certain things have a relationship that’s very that’s in a sense, there’s an affordance that if I ask the person sitting next to me trying to do the same task, they would not have because they don’t have as much experience doing that sort of work. So that’s an interesting thing that but I hadn’t really thought of that until you mentioned it.
Speaker6: Well, well.
Frode Hegland: Academically I have a superpower called Mr. Anderson. So there you go. Right. Danny would you like to go more on case studies, or are we going to beg these guys to write down a case study of their own for next meeting?
Dene Grigar: I think. I think we’re done with this because we can get to Andrew’s part, which I’m anxious to, to do.
Speaker6: Yeah.
Dene Grigar: But yeah, I mean, it’d be great if other people add to this information and know that when I’m finished with this document, I want to put this in our book. Right. This will be one of the articles in the book. So any kind of feedback that you give me please let me know if there’s things that you find. I tried to find all the. Typos. So if you see anything like that, please do not hesitate to tell me if you see anything that’s fallacious. Know that I edit people’s work and I certainly welcome other people to edit mine.
Frode Hegland: So I asked Denny and chat why she didn’t use author to write this, and there was a very good reason she didn’t know how to put in images, which is not an obvious thing to do. So we’ve discussed that. But a result of that is I tried to copy her text from the PDF and it was really quite garbled as usual. That is something that doesn’t happen with author, and it’s certainly not because my technology is any better. I think that it’s simply that my coders are using a simpler underlying body, and we’re using relatively modern parsers. So that was interesting to see the context contrast for that. Shall we briefly look at the symposium invitation? Yeah. Denny. Yeah.
Dene Grigar: And I do want to mention that I will put this in author. What I’ll do is I’ll run my images through Photoshop and get them all sized properly. That way I can put them in the article. Right? Right now they’re all different sizes because I took them on my phone.
Speaker6: Or you can send them.
Frode Hegland: To me and I’ll very happily do that. I Photoshop is my thing.
Dene Grigar: I’ve got a computer right here devoted to Photoshop that I own. No cloud for Photoshop for me.
Speaker6: Fair enough.
Frode Hegland: Right? If you guys can just skim the invitation, see if you have any major issues.
Dene Grigar: We want it to be very clear. So we’re separating the the activities, the symposium from the book.
Frode Hegland: So just to tell you guys what this page is, this page is the link that an emailed invitation would point to. So it’s a little bit more information kind of stuff.
Dene Grigar: And we’ll use this for the symposium. Language would go on the invitation card and the announcement card that we’re making.
Mark Anderson: This is the fifth volume because wouldn’t this year be volume four? So is this for a year. Hence it’s.
Dene Grigar: It’s the fifth, I think I was in third and then I wasn’t in fourth.
Frode Hegland: Give me a minute there, young man. I’m stupid enough to made that mistake before. No, no.
Speaker6: Yeah.
Frode Hegland: The one we just released was for the next one will be number IV. The number V, not IV.
Speaker6: Okay. No thanks for.
Frode Hegland: Checking because I had actually messed that up for quite a while before, but clearly in the wrong order then just putting two.
Mark Anderson: It’s perhaps. Well, it’s water on the British way now. But I must say, perhaps the choice of using a bar symbol for for to do three’s whilst in graphic design term, which was nice, seems to play merry havoc with most digital extraction forms. Is something that I has been reinforced to me in. You know, it’s all pertinent to this as we want a shuttle, as we want to shuttle stuff with consistent meaning backwards and forwards.
Speaker6: You know why it.
Frode Hegland: Started, right? It was a carrot. The cursor insertion point.
Speaker6: Okay.
Frode Hegland: Indicate that it’s digital and printed form. And then for version. I never intended to do more than one book I see. So then. So you’re right. Typographically it doesn’t really work. It’s difficult.
Mark Anderson: If I had three insertion carrots, I’d definitely reboot. Something’s gone seriously wrong. This.
Frode Hegland: So any any comments on the page?
Dene Grigar: Look, we’ll be adding more data after tomorrow’s meeting. Hopefully we can put the name of the building there and all that stuff. And may I mention one more thing? I I’ve been grant writing like crazy. And if we get the Andy Warhol grant in the lab, it gives us about $10,000 for an exhibition, a VR exhibition for this event. And what I’m hoping to have is, you know, a people like Mez Breeze’s work, you know? Folks that are known to be VR artists. Kate Caitlin Fisher, you know, have not a lot of work, but maybe 4 or 5 really nice pieces so that people can experience them. And there’s plenty of space in that room for an exhibition.
Frode Hegland: And before we. That’s wonderful. Denny. Sorry, I it’s the middle of the night, so my brain’s a bit off. Please, guys. Suggest 1 or 2 names. You know, we’re going to go whole hog into that now. But, you know, if it’s Donald Trump, if he if you think he has a good perspective, it doesn’t matter who it is, just someone who would be.
Speaker6: Yes, it does matter.
Frode Hegland: Not necessarily a thinker, but a thought. Provoker. Yeah.
Speaker6: No, no, no Donald Trump.
Dene Grigar: No no no, I’m going to say this. If we had someone like that at this event, anyone that’s MAGA, you won’t have anybody on the West Coast coming.
Speaker6: You know I won’t be.
Dene Grigar: I won’t fucking be there. I won’t put it on, I will protest
Frode Hegland: You know, I’m not a Trump supporter, so that shouldn’t be a problem. Okay. Everybody’s enthusiastically nodded yes to all everything there. So, Mark, did you want to say a few library things today?
Mark Anderson: Other than there is a there is a document in the basekamp. It’s there I think it’s one of these things, having written it, that it’s something that you might need if you’re just wondering between the difference between whatever your own, whatever your own perception of your library is and the library as we talk, we talk about it within the context of using Freud’s augmented tool set. There’s no there’s not a it’s definitely not a sort of binary comparison I’m making. So the issue isn’t qualitative between the two. It’s about understanding when when we say in the library what this actually means. So it has a particular meaning in a technical sense. In terms of the augmented tools set or. Well, it’s really in reader at the moment. And so it’s something you should be able to skim read. I’m not going to drag it, run through it. You can skim read it quickly. If you’ve got any questions let me know. I, I think that’s it. I think we just bore you rigid. If I pulled it up on screen and marched through all the words and you put a.
Dene Grigar: Link to it. Mark.
Mark Anderson: Oh, sorry. Yeah, it’s in it’s in the basekamp bearing a second. It is at.
Dene Grigar: I’m looking for it right now.
Mark Anderson: I think I’ve just put a link in that’s taken out of my browser, which is thank you. It’s there in author as well, because Fred did an author, which I’ve done. But you know, here probably there is a PDF as well, and I think that’s PDF I’ve, I’ve sent you the link to. So it’s probably more useful. But otherwise, no. I think let’s save the time for for designing things and VR, XR rather it’s.
Frode Hegland: Thank you Mark.
Speaker6: It’s been really read through this.
Dene Grigar: I’ll read through this too. Thank you.
Frode Hegland: It’s been really interesting having author on my iPhone. Which is not something I expected to be able to do. And Hang on. I’m just going to. Show you something real quick here.
Speaker6: So here it is.
Frode Hegland: So it’s the same documents that I have on my Mac and that I have on vision. And because of the architecture that iOS and vision is quite similar. It’s possible I’m going to compress my design in hyper texture layering and try to do this brief as possible. So we have as much time as possible for Andrew. What? I’m trying just to do a few provocations. Nod silently if you can’t see this.
Speaker6: All right.
Frode Hegland: So lots of text here. I put it in slack, but the summation of it is Oh, hang on, that’s not what? Sorry. Zoom is doing all kinds of. Things. I just need to move you out of the way. Sorry, guys. Okay. I can only see Houdini. So the rest of you can relax, right? Okay, so the first thing here is a thought for something to do with references and writing. I’ve mocked it up as though it’s an author, but I’ll show you at the end how I think it would be better in XR. So at the bottom of the screen you currently in author have rights slash map. By the way, feel free to interrupt me at any time. I’m thinking of adding references, so I will now click on references. No sorry. First map. So you know what I mean by map. This is the author map paradigm so to speak. Then I click on references and by default hang on, there is a zoom issue. There we go. And by default it’s a column because columns are very useful very often if you just want to find a reference. So if you look at the lower right it’s currently sorted by author. It can also be sorted by timeline and by occurrence meaning where it is in the document. So you can see the headings too. So that could be nice. But lower left notice it says column. So I’ll click on timeline. And what that does is it takes whatever organization in the up and down. Keeps it, and then it takes a timeline from left to right. So here the older documents are on the left. The newer documents are on the right.
Frode Hegland: So you see the little vertical lines, they indicate exactly where these documents are on the timeline. Any questions on this one? Because this is really the key point.
Mark Anderson: I assume it’s just a typo. Looking at the second thing down where X 23 seems to have disappeared into the past. I’m so I’m just wondering. I get the point you’re making, and I’m not. I’m not.
Speaker6: Meaning this is random text.
Frode Hegland: This is not real.
Mark Anderson: Okay. Okay. Right. Understood. Yeah.
Frode Hegland: No, no, no, but thank you for for for looking at it. So the whole idea is just this. And this is the same. Except in this one. It doesn’t take time into account in this one, it stretches it out on the horizon. Yes, Mr. Thompson.
Dene Grigar: And we can’t hear you, dear. We can’t hear you speak.
Andrew Thompson: Can you hear me now?
Speaker6: We can hear you now.
Andrew Thompson: I think my cable’s going out. I was going to say this. This doesn’t matter too much. But I just want to clarify. So vertically, you said it’s by corporation or whatever authored it. Is it sorted alphabetically? Is it randomized? What’s determining in the timeline view? What’s determining the verticality?
Frode Hegland: You’re right, it doesn’t matter so much because it’s something for us to decide. Currently. And this mockup, it is just by first name, alphabetically.
Andrew Thompson: So I’m talking about the timeline view, though. Oh, but it’s still the same. Yeah.
Frode Hegland: So that’s the entire point. Thank you for bringing it up. The x axis doesn’t change. They’re the same. Obviously I haven’t used the same data. Right. But imagine from this to this all that happens is it spreads out. So even in this view, I can have it now shift to be by author or by title or by occurrence.
Andrew Thompson: Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. Having it be different data confused me, but that makes sense.
Frode Hegland: No, but thank you for pointing that out, because this is just a photoshopping keynote cut up job. So this is going towards trying to use multiple dimensions. This Z hasn’t been used yet. Yes. Mark.
Speaker6: Are you on?
Mark Anderson: Just wanted to say that I really like this. Because this, in a sense, is is putting a picture to something that people keep talking about and never doing. The reality is, of course, it’ll never work out quite as you think, because it turns out, you know the date you may have used. But that in itself is useful because I think it helps an inquiring person to, to, you know, do a meta reflection, which is useful in terms of sense making. So I think I, I think this is a really interesting thing to do.
Speaker6: Thanks.
Frode Hegland: Thank you. Mark. This is basically the result of my PhD, the whole thing, because I started doing these kinds of visualizations back in the beginning, and all of them became too much theater. So this one has been distilled down to stretch it out when you want to don’t when you don’t. Mr. Wassilko.
Peter Wasilko: Yes. Another element that would be really nice would be if we could record when we became aware of a citation, because that sequence of when I discovered things would really help in reconstructing my thought pattern later on. You know, because we generally lose that once we throw it all into bibliography database, everything is treated as if it’s just one generic blob that arrived at the same time, and the sequence of going from one link to another link following those strands. And the way I kind of visualize it, if anyone ever watched the old Andromeda TV series, they had the slipstream drive with all the little threads connecting the different star systems. I sort of almost visualized the body of literature the same way.
Frode Hegland: I think what you’re talking about now is crucial. This is a topic we’ve looked at in different ways over the years where. Oh yeah, no, I the thing I thought about in Beijing. Right. Even that. Exactly. Yeah. So metadata and metadata. So I’ve been going through Mark has been helping me with corrections for my thesis. And it’s been useful to go back and follow and find out what metadata means in this sense. And, you know, it means you can have hypertextual affordances. We’re going to get to something else at the end. But I just wanted to show you this. You’ve already seen this, Peter. When you select something, a little bit more comes up, such as the author and the date. So you don’t have to have the date on here all the time. But if you want to, maybe you could. Like in Photoshop, you do command R for ruler, the equivalent of that. But so now we have what we’ve already seen with Adam and Mark’s work. Things connected to the left is what this document cites things from the right. That’s what cites it, but only when you select them. Now, what you’re talking about, Peter, I think is crucial. It should be possible to have a list of people here. So, for instance, I would be able I would like to quickly, instantly filter out, for example, everything that Dini has shared with me.
Speaker8: Yes yes yes exactly. Yes. That’s.
Peter Wasilko: Yes. You see where I’m. Yes, we’re on the exact same page.
Frode Hegland: So I think that when Doug Engelbart did his work and Van Dam and Ted, they had no infrastructure to worry about. So they did everything, which was good and bad. We’re living in a world where we have to consider the infrastructures that exist, and this is why I want us to put all of this in visual, meta, and JSON when being transported, because we can own the entire universe, but in a completely open way that anybody can easily extract any of the data if they want to use it differently. So each of these documents should record all of these things. If someone’s written something in the chat, I can’t read it. Is it relevant to this? Please read it out. Otherwise I’ll look at it after.
Dene Grigar: Can I. Can I ask you something? Because I. I’m not as up on your visual meta as you are. You know, I’m still trying to grasp grasp it. Right. It’s different from the kind of metadata we’re doing in the lab. So let’s imagine that Going back to Peter’s comment about wanting to know who put that marginalia in the book and track that, and then my my addition to that comment is, I’d like to know when they did it. Like what what what time period did this take place in? Okay, perfect. So when when I’m looking at this, will I, if I click on, let’s say, the psychedelic inspiration for HyperCard.
Dene Grigar: And that would give me the reference that that’s coming from. Okay. That also give me.
Speaker6: I’m sorry.
Frode Hegland: No no no no, I interrupted you. I didn’t mean to.
Dene Grigar: Could that also give me any, any notes on that topic and the name of the person and the date of those notes?
Frode Hegland: I think the Texan phrase would be hello.
Speaker6: This is really, really important.
Frode Hegland: And yeah the next slide is based on you talking about putting things in 3D space. So I’m going to answer that with a yes with two caveats. One, we as a community have to discuss what that is. And to Mark, what would you like to say?
Mark Anderson: Actually. Well, sorry. You almost sort of covered it. I was going to just go back to saying, I mean, the challenge at the moment is we I think we we can we can imagine the things we want. The challenge at the moment is, is the tools that we have on on not ideally ideal for that purpose. So we tend to realize the information we need after the time has passed for us to have captured it correctly. So that’s part of the challenge that we’re going through at the moment.
Frode Hegland: Oh absolutely. No question. Boom. Right. So. First of all, how this would look in XR. I don’t know. Can you see the bottom of the screen? Because my zoom thing is covering it. You can’t. Oh, okay. Fine. So just put it in the Magic Andrew box. The same kind of things that you might have had in author, you know, column view, slash, timeline, view, and also the different criteria. That’s what this box is for. This is obviously not a design. It’s an indication of if we do something like this, that’s a good place for it. And of course, Mark, you have many comments on this which we’ll get to with Andrew’s reality. So then I want to talk briefly about the big issue here, which is what I fear, the lack of a better term right now. I called layered hypertext. The traditional hypertext and the weak sense as a hyperlink go from here to there, usually as a card. Forget about Ted Nelson. You know, his idea was bigger and more vague. Then we have spatial hypertext, which means XYZ matters, but a really important aspect. And this is not new. I’m just trying to put a spotlight on it by giving it a name is the stuff that isn’t on the screen right now, stuff being able to come in. We’ve had many discussions over the years with Jim and Bob horn and all these people coming in saying, I don’t like the layout. There should be more bold highlight spaces and all of that stuff. That’s one of the things that should be an extra, extra thing.
Frode Hegland: For instance Mark was talking earlier about editing a document. You should be able to. Okay, I’ll put it from my perspective because it’s simpler. I want to be able to read and subscribe to Danny’s article. Annotations. For what’s in her field and may be marked for what’s in his field, because I consider them DJs. They’re experts. So the whole thing we talked about an RSS type feed from people you trust, just normal humans can be very useful, but those annotations should be in the document. Just like hypothesis and all these other things. They should be in the document but separate. So it could be a page of this is what DNA is highlighted, not hidden inside the code, so that I can choose to show it or hide it. And then I can have different levels on top of that. So this kind of layering also comes into XR. So what really mentally pissed me off when Deeney talked about moving things around in spaces. You can’t really do that right now. Easily in vision native. Of course you can do it in XR. It’s something that should be simple. So the idea here is that. Somebody does something to a document, either an author or a reader. The author can do things like. Highlighting a bit of text. So when you choose to see the author’s highlights, they are there. You know, it’s the author’s, you know, they come in, it’s an ACM. However, the author wanted to say other things. There’s no reason you cannot have audio through a URL linked to specific bits to.
Speaker6: All right, so someone.
Frode Hegland: Can read the section for you. All of these things are entirely possible. The only thing that’s an issue is the infrastructure to make it real. And that’s why having a page and Peter, I say it every week. Thank you for the idea of disposable visual meta pages. So imagine a page at the end of a document that says quite literally in the description top says this is Dene Grigar voice comments to this document. And then below, at least where they are in the document and where that audio file is, because that’s too big to include in the document. Right. And that’s it. That’s the thing here. And the the thing that brings us all the way back to Deeney in space is when Deeney takes a chunk of text and puts it over there and another piece over there and she writes a bit here and she squiggles there and so on. That is really, really valuable. So when exiting the space, all of that should be recorded in the back of the document that Deeney in this location at this time put that bit there, this bit there relative to the main document. Right. That can then be shared. And the community if she wants it to be. Right. And this is how we can start building up these layers of what is there in a really, really simple way. Because the saving grace for me, I’ve wondered if I would destroy visual media because it could do things, but it’s the opposite. The bit in the beginning becomes the prompt to the LM, so we can put in almost anything with almost zero effort, except from some special things which we need to coordinate with. Andrew Denny a good timing.
Dene Grigar: Yeah. What you’re suggesting is a new genre of scholarly communication. Right, Mark? They were actually counting notes and note structures. As a kind of intellectual writing activity that can be shared and published. And I think that’s important to point out, because we haven’t really had much of a much of a new genre in a long time. Hypertext was kind of it. We’ve not done a lot of new kind of writing, and this would be that.
Frode Hegland: Yeah, exactly. And? You know, there are so many things that can go into such an approach, such as. One thing we talked about a while ago is to use hashtags to communicate between documents. If there’s a hashtag on the first page that says case studies, then we know in our community it refers to the discussion of case studies. So in our XR view from here it is. And you can see it by date. So you know who wrote it first and second and so on. So the second to bottom bullet here left the text in 3D. That’s exactly the knee standing in space moving things about, but also relationships with other documents, just like with a hashtag. But it could also be spatial hypertext. It can be that let’s say there’s something like you move the document to touch another one, then you move it slightly off. So you created a. Kind of a connection that can be recorded to. And and then there was the trigger place, and I remember.
Dene Grigar: Can I say something else about go back to that slide. One thing that’s interesting from a textual analysis, because I’m very interested in textual analysis, especially born digital textual analysis, like who wrote the code, who added to the code, who who changed the document and when write. All of that is really important stuff. And I can look at a, I can look at a work of electronic literature and pretty much determine who wrote that. It’s like kind of like wine tasting, being able to taste a wine and say, oh, that’s French, that’s Bordeaux, that’s polyak. It’s 1983, right? It’s that kind of analysis. And so what I think is interesting from this, from that perspective, is that if we’re able to track the kinds of activities that are happening on the document in this noted know it, notice writing style, then we’re looking at a way to analyze people’s general behavior with text. Like I would do something different with the text. Something’s very Deanie about the way this text has been manipulated. Something’s very marked about this way. And that’s another interesting area of study. So I’m interested. Like what? What we can do out of this intellectually as much as what we’re making. Right? So thank you.
Speaker6: Absolutely.
Frode Hegland: So I’m just removing something here, so it’s. Okay. Hang on. Okay, so here’s a paper by Bill Atkinson. And it had no metadata, so obviously I assigned it. But along the lines of what you’re saying, Danny, if I do this, if I use
Speaker6: They ask AI.
Frode Hegland: To just extract the names.
Speaker6: We.
Frode Hegland: Have that issue. Okay. The point is, it can’t easily be be added all of these things, one per page. Peter. Oh. Hi, Randall.
Peter Wasilko: Okay. One of the interesting phenomenons I’ve noticed relatively recently is people in Twitter or even on the radio will mention hat tips and it’ll be hat tip, whatever. It was the source that led you to the thing that you’re directly citing, and getting that into our visual meta would be really, really valuable. And it’s sometimes you, like, follow a hat tip to source and you’ll discover that that person will be hat tipping another person. So you start getting into this whole rut of connections, of how the information spreads. So it’s not just the citation, but what was the provenance of the citation as it passed through the scholarly network of people noticing it and passing it on to other groups? Also, another interesting thing to look at is all of the contribution pages and metrics that GitHub provides on who is contributing to which repos, and even there you have a notion of the purpose and the nature of the contribution. That would be interesting to know. For instance, I might find that someone is an incredibly good critic of code, but all the code that they write themselves is horribly disorganized rubbish. And I don’t want to just have a reading that, you know, so and so is a brilliant coder. I want to say which one of those subdimensions of skill sets are relevant? Some of them might be really good at following threads and leading to things, but their own analysis and commentary either is diametrically opposed to my views, and I don’t want to bother wasting my time reading it, or of a relatively low quality.
Peter Wasilko: But again, it could be really high quality in some other facet. Other people I might trust it recommending people, but have no direct trust in their own assessments. So I might find that maybe if Mark says that someone is good at providing proofreading, he’s almost always invariably, absolutely right. He might not be a good proofreader himself or. He might be really good at some other domain task. So if you just sort of like start to develop an ontology describing these different facets of scholarship, as opposed to treating it as just one generic box of doing everything and assembling it all into a final printed paper, and then we could start crediting people also for those other kinds of contributions. And that would really help. Also, in looking at multi-author papers, I really wish I could tell from a paper with 16 authors which facets of the project the individual authors were focused on, so I could then burrow directly into their work, because that’s what I’m interested in, as opposed to having the big bag of everyone who contributed in some way with no idea of what their individual participation level and focus was.
Speaker6: Yep, yep.
Frode Hegland: Absolutely. Double. Yep. Brandel, what ups have you got?
Speaker6: I have.
Brandel Zachernuk: That. I really love the idea of encoding the annotations of what somebody did by virtue of reading and processing a document. I’m just about rounding out the final turn of reading Too Much to Know by Anne and Blair and just the, the, the bodily manipulation and mutilation of books that people have done by turns to construct and compose reference documents over the centuries, leaves me feeling really bereft of a record of that, and that there have been practices, you know, sometimes illegal and other times taboo, but nevertheless, where people have really done stuff to their materials in order to render it sort of legible and, and referenceable and things like that. And and so, so it’s something that I want to want to do myself is to play a little bit more. You know, I’ve got that that being able to open and open a book to any page and things, something that I think I’m going to do, maybe for a demo up in the city is to be able to then allow people to tear books into the pieces that they are. So then you can compare entire chapters of books based on the sort of the relative contents of them, because there’s no better target for a term frequency inverse document frequency analysis than the one book itself.
Brandel Zachernuk: And comparing, you know, before this part of Alice in Wonderland after and things like that. So, so I’m really excited about the sort of construction and presentation of a read, you know, of a session with a text as a text. And I, I’m, I would love to hear from Danny and Mark and everybody else about whether there are reasonable reference points for where anybody has encoded practices, where it has sort of documented practices of more bodily action over text in the past in the context of sort of scholars scholarly pursuit, because I think we have kind of memory hold a lot of that. Given that we like, we just use documents on computers or we just, you know, we just read and highlight like that just seems to really want in comparison to some of the very meaty and kind of distressing things that people have done to to pages and books in the past. So, yeah.
Dene Grigar: I’ve seen that in works dealing with their code base. Right. That so people in adding their own code to a work are taking code and I’m thinking of Taroko Gorge by Nick Montfort, who’s at MIT, wrote the script for a poem. A haiku and then share that script with everybody and that his friends. And then they all use that same code but changed out words. So you have a whole series of Taroko gorges versions using the code, but with their own words. And I think that’s a real fascinating activity. And I can share that link with you if you want to see it.
Speaker6: Yeah. Thank you. Just.
Frode Hegland: Briefly on that. Randall. It’s dawning more and more on me as I’m getting dragged away from the relatively traditional document. Thank you, Mark, that the dimensions we’re talking about unleashing here are, of course, spatial, but they’re also, of course, interactive. And in these discussions, I think it’s really amazing for us to learn what that means. And it really does mean bringing back, tearing apart, doodling and then adding the magic bit of not losing the original and of being able to share it and of being able to layer it. So yeah, I think very much on the same priority page.
Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah. Well, that’s the thing. Like there’s always been this tension between sort of the like the ultimate demise of the underlying text versus the utility people can derive from making sort of modifications and annotations. And nevertheless, people have had sustained this practice of really messing stuff up, up to that line. But at the time when we can do so in an intrinsically nondestructive way, we’ve kind of backed away from it. And I just feel like that’s it’s a really sad disconnection of the, the past to the present in terms of that practice. So yeah, I feel like there’s a lot we can recover before we even start to discover what kinds of what kinds of mayhem we can wreak on documents in order to be able to help. Make sense of our sense making.
Speaker6: Discover.
Frode Hegland: Recover as we pull off the book cover. Absolutely. And just one second mark on a last comment. This is where I see lambs being literally a godsend because visual meta could have been a fight for standards, but now all it is is whatever experiments you want to do. Brundle with this storing or someone else in the community, just write a paragraph of what it is first. It’s the prompt. So we don’t have to have a universally acknowledged standard for every thing you know, they can compete and hopefully something will settle like rail. So it’s a lot clearer, cleaner, more robust. But we can start playing. Mr.. Mark. Sorry.
Mark Anderson: Yes. I was thinking actually probably picking up a point. Let’s start with the point that Bernard is making. I mean, I suspect a lot of this sort of the, the deconstructive work is, is probably hidden behind the curtain in the past because it was slightly transgressive. You know, if you if you want to bring an academic department to a halt, just start asking about people’s referencing practices, and everyone start looking at their shoes. They’re out the window. Because, you know, that happens in private and doesn’t need to be seen. It’s messy, doesn’t need to be seen by the. So I think there’s an element of that. That doesn’t mean it can’t be caught. Which brings back to the sort of thing that made me put my hand up. And this is going to sound negative, and I don’t mean it, but I wonder at which point all the necessary capture of this reaches around the back and becomes a surveillance culture. Because, you know, because going back to the point I’ve just made, that if if my sort of tearing apart of the books is a transgressive thing, I, I wish to do unseen by others I now have a, I now have a sort of a tension between the capture of this really interesting and rich metadata and the fact that I don’t actually want it capture because I don’t want people to know that how and why of what I did it, but I I’m on the capture side.
Mark Anderson: I think what we’re talking about argues to an area that I think is, you know, whether it’s less advanced than I expect with a lot of the new sort of AI stuff, which is effectively assistive agents. So instead of just at the moment, we tend to use this as a magic eight ball, say, what is the answer? And we get something back, but rather something that’s sitting alongside a side. You doing tasks that most of us probably don’t have, the sort of the what’s the word I’m looking for the concentration to do to capture that in a moment, because one of the problem is we’re talking about we want to capture an intentionality of doing something. Normally at the moment when you do that, you’re busy doing it with the intent of doing the next thing. So it’s not until probably your several steps on that you would be at the point where you think I’ve just done something. Whereas if you were to step out in the middle of it, you’ve now actually stepped out of your context, which is why I think it’s it seems to me like an absolutely sort of good case for using some of this new technology we have where it’s sitting alongside you now, you know, you’d have to tell it what you want to capture.
Mark Anderson: But I again, it’s interesting we have we have to construct these and also it argues towards a completely new generation of tools that we don’t have at the moment. Because one of our, one of our, one of our unintentional strictures at the moment is most of our tools are based or based along the lines of either basically writing on paper or, you know, drawing on or painting on canvas sort of thing. And that’s not to be dismissive at all, but it because they have such a strong lineage in that it’s quite difficult for them to absorb all these new processes. And I suspect, you know, put it this way, I don’t think we’ll do the things we want to do by putting something extra in word, for example, not to speak ill of it, but but simply because it’s, you know, it’s stretching that model too far. So the fun part of this is, is what that means, and I think it’s coming up and I think I know I’ve hopped on a minute. It does seem to me it changes the, the notion or the boundary of what a document is. It doesn’t worry me what it is, and it doesn’t worry that it might change. The main difficulty is just knowing what it is so we can communicate it. You know, between ourselves, I’m afraid I’m dying to answer. So.
Frode Hegland: Have you not read my thesis, Mark? Simon Buckingham brought this point up. Because of the defined glossary and author. He said, you may be defining, let’s say, a person as being difficult, and you don’t want that to go into the world. So the act of publishing is really, really important. If you share a document, you should have an easy and convenient way of deciding what meta stuff goes with it. So yeah, hugely important.
Dene Grigar: I want to mention Mark just to respond to the surveillance culture. I remember during the 1992 election for president, when Bill Clinton was running for the Democrat Democratic Party, there was a huge outcry about reporters going to Blockbuster Video and getting a list of all the videos he had checked out. In the last four years and going to libraries to see what books he had checked out. Right. So tracking down his activities there, trying to show that he was a womanizer, he was probably renting pornography from blockbuster. It was a huge outcry about this. Right. So how much privacy do we get to have? And, you know, when we check something out it’s it’s it’s who gets to know what we’re looking at. And that, I mean, I can go to the bookstore and buy a book and nobody knows what I’d buy, but I’d check it out from iBook. And, you know, if it was any other company except Apple, it probably would let people know what I, what I bought. Right. So I think that’s interesting.
Frode Hegland: I just replied to your correction information about that on that specific issue because there is a difference between metadata between things and metadata inside things. The way that I view it between things is surveillance metadata. How many times did he go to the bookshop? Inside metadata is this book is about chocolate. And chapter three is about this, right. That’s why I separate those two very clearly. And I think that’s important. This was fruitful. Useful. And I think we can move over to Andrew. Now, I just want to ask you guys if you have design ideas, even if it’s rough, please give them to us. We will put it in the book if you want. We will use it. If you have use cases, please do the same. You know, that’s it. Any other things before we jump in the deep end with with Andrew? And by the way, this is the last point today. Andrew, I combined my two bits. I don’t know why they were separate, I apologize.
Dene Grigar: I’m going to take a bio break and I’ll be right back, okay?
Frode Hegland: Taking a brief break is not a bad idea. I’ll do the same. See you in a minute.
Mark Anderson: I’m just going to bring up the point that someone’s mentioned about bringing data in. I found it interesting a while back to help people be able to track down books. I’ve sort of talked about, I thought, well, I’ll take all my you know, academic book purchases, so to speak. Put them into good reads, because that’s easy to find, I think. And it turned out that, for instance, I can’t get info out of Amazon. Which I know is a partner thing without everything coming. So you get all my academic books and a ton of sort of, you know, vaguely trashy sci fi that I read by way of diversion. Not that I mind, but it just exemplifies this point that, you know, I mean, it’s easy to bring it in, and then you assume you’ll take it out. You don’t take it out because actually, it’s more trouble than it’s worth, and who cares? But if you did care about if you, you know, if you wanted this very much for the zeitgeist, if you wanted a very curated view of what you do, it’s a lot more it is a lot more complicated than than we we we propose because you’d be needing to tweak all those automatic filters that are following you. To a degree and a granularity that I suspect few of us in the general population would have the time or the interest to do.
Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah, that’s sort of the, the uniformity or the of what a person is and presents as is an interesting challenge that I’ve thought a lot about on, on Twitter because I, I’m not a whole person on there. I just talk about what I, what I talk about because I think it’s important enough, but it’s, it’s a, it’s a weird calculus that a lot of people will go like, oh, you just be your whole self. It’s like, but no, we’re we’re a mosaic of concerns and interests. And actually, it’s not always it’s not always trivial, but it’s all it’s it’s not always impossible either to separate those concerns and say, no, this is this is me talking about information processing and HCI. This is me talking about how fun it is to play with dogs. And there’s, you know, some overlap. But yeah, it’s it’s an interesting one for people to discover as they as they end up more enveloped in an information space and recognize that, like this idea of profiles or personas or whatever else is something, one that should happen and two maybe needs to be able to be like tweaked and massaged after the fact. Something that I’ve been very surprised about in slack is the fact that it’s not possible to rethread a message if you post immediately afterward, like I often will delete it and try to put it into the thread, but that gets thwarted sometimes if people start replying to it. So yeah, like that sort of collation of things into conceptual coherence versus sort of temporal or individualistic based, like convenience of like, well, I did all of these things so that they’re all the same versus I did them with these intents or under these sort of auspices, I don’t know, I don’t have a solution.
Mark Anderson: So that seems to speak to the tension between the sort of the engineering perspective. You know, just recording it in a way that can be recalled and reproducing is is robust and consistent against the much more loose edged sort of human perspective. And, you know, I know that’s what you recorded, but that’s what, you know, I misremembered this. What you’re supposed to remember is something that I didn’t say which is how we tend to function. So we edit as we go and we, we throw away that. And of course from a, from a purely engineering standpoint, that’s actually quite hard to do because unless someone’s passing the signals so that implies a curation loop, which again, is, is another overhead. To, to all this background.
Frode Hegland: I think Danny and I can both speak to the importance of portraying yourself differently depending on context. Being teachers, I was only for a while, but yeah, my students did not know all of whom I am, that’s for sure. Please put on headsets as Randall’s already started for this. And, Peter, please go ahead.
Peter Wasilko: Yeah. I just wanted to circle back to Denise’s comment about looking into the library, borrowing history. And a few years back I was looking at that topic, and there was actually a period of time following the McCarthyism era in which librarians decided that they were consciously not going to maintain any records, and it was for a very long span, basically up until the advent of open source software. And what happened during that period was that they’d make sure that the moment an article was returned to the library, it would get flushed from the records, so that if someone arrived from the government with a legally binding subpoena, the librarian could just say, well, there is no such data that’s in answer to your subpoena. So there’s nothing we can do to help you. Whereas if they kept the records, they’d be able to do it. Now, the downside of that is that we had, for instance, at our local library system, some I jokingly referred to it as the Guacamole Bandit because these DVDs would come in and it would be totally encrusted with guacamole movie after movie. And of course, when I’d complain about this, they’d say, well, it’s already had been returned. So we have no way to figure out who it is who keeps coding these discs and guacamole while they’re watching the movies, and wrecking disc after disc after disc. Now the library systems are trying to switch over to open source design Opac software, and as a result, the programmers who are developing those systems didn’t come from library school culture. And as a result, now my local public library’s catalog by default tracks a record of everything that I’ve taken out going back as far as the last hard reboot of the system’s database. So now that data is back in the system and potentially accessible with the warrant, and I don’t think anyone was even consciously aware of this major shift in librarianship practice. It just sort of happened as a side effect of who was producing the software that was driving the library catalogs.
Frode Hegland: Yep, these are real issues.
Frode Hegland: Under. Do you want to talk us through it? Should we just dive in or.
Dene Grigar: And can we have the link to the activity in the chat so I don’t have to go and pull up slack on this computer?
Speaker6: It is there.
Andrew Thompson: Yeah, it’s it’s in the zoom chat.
Dene Grigar: Oh, thank you so much. Okay.
Andrew Thompson: But I will grab also the link to the video because.
Speaker6: Oh, the videos there as.
Andrew Thompson: Well on.
Frode Hegland: That on that page.
Andrew Thompson: Okay. Perfect. Done. Yeah. Just go directly to the 10th of the April page. Okay.
Frode Hegland: Watch the video while you narrate it. Is that the plan? That sounds good to me.
Andrew Thompson: Yeah, that’d be fine. A short change log, but some interesting stuff. I’ve been working with finally in the library. Has been wanting to for quite a while. And we got to the point where I was able to so I’ve made a sort of test JSON file that is a library of all the ACM 22 hypertext papers. Thanks to all the amazing stuff Mark has set up for me. So those are all the papers there. It contains, like, the bare minimum data that I’m currently using, just like author year title. And then a source. And from the source I’m able to grab the abstract. So that’s the abstract isn’t contained in the JSON because that would start to get large. But the link is and then it’s grabbed. We can add as much more as we want on top of that JSON as we deem necessary. I just would suggest that we do not remove anything that I’ve put in there. Unless like fundamentally I’ve messed something up and we want to argue about that. So that’s all red inside of the XHR environment now. So when you first enter, you’ll be greeted with a library rather than it just auto closing like it used to. And that’s just a, a column of all the documents in the library.
Andrew Thompson: If you point at them, it’ll give you an updating preview of the abstract, the title, author. The year, the year doesn’t change because they’re all 22, but it is updating. And you can just point and select and it will load it in to the environment. We only have the citation block right now set up. That’s just all we’ve made. So it just loads the citation block. But it is the loading the document from the links. Nothing’s referenced directly there. And you can now have multiple documents at once, which is something we’ve been wanting for quite a while. It is still just the citation block, but, you know, working on it. I also updated the text block handles. I know there was a complaint on that. They were like, kind of hard to grab sometimes, but also they were in the way. It was a rough balance. So now they’re really skinny. And if you point near it, they grow to be like about twice as large as they used to be. So it’s kind of a solution that fixes both problems. Yeah elegance. And then, of course, the library now actually sort of works as a library. That’s the thing on your wrist. So if you hold there and it expands, the workspace that you’re working in now actually moves out of the way.
Andrew Thompson: In the past, it would just kind of stay there and you just sort of changed the background. So it pushes that away. You have the library again. You can grab more and close it. That’s mostly the changes. For this week, there’s a very noticeable issue that I’ve come across now. I mentioned it in the past where having large amounts of troika text starts to lag the environment quite a lot. And it was kind of handwaved away. We’re like, it’s fine. It shouldn’t be an issue because troika should be robust. It’s very much not if we go above like two citation blocks, we start to get noticeable frame drops. So we need to figure out what’s going on there, or we need to ditch troika. I don’t know what else is out there. It’s going to be a big problem if we ditch troika because everything is built off of it by now. But I’m open for any suggestions because I could have done something wrong with troika. Maybe I have the resolution to hire something and I can save a bunch of processing power there. But anyways be worth discussing that for any of the programmers who know stuff there.
Frode Hegland: Yeah, let’s talk about that. I’m just going to.
Dene Grigar: Say something about the the hyperlink strings. I just they’re so beautiful because they’re in 3D, right? They don’t look like flat objects across the screen. Anybody notice that besides me?
Speaker6: Please repeat.
Frode Hegland: I was writing a note here in the chat.
Dene Grigar: The the hypertextual links the strings that we pull to pull something out. The strings look like they’re a 3D space. They’re. They’re not flat, which is terrific. I haven’t said anything about that, but it’s really quite nice. And even the menus float. They don’t look like they’re. I mean, they’re floating on top of text. They’re not against the wall flat.
Speaker6: Yeah.
Dene Grigar: That’s. That’s impressive.
Speaker6: I have an.
Frode Hegland: Important aside to Fabian. I see you use the quest three for this. And also you, Brundle, rather than the Apple Vision Pro which you both have access to. Is that because you don’t have the Apple Vision Pro with you, Fabian, or is webXR currently a better experience on the quest three?
Fabien Benetou: Just because I assume that it was a bit more tested with the quest three, but I. I can try right now with the Vision Pro two.
Speaker6: Oh no, no, don’t don’t worry.
Frode Hegland: I did it on the vision. I just wondered if there was a known difference because, you know, we keep comparing these things. That’s all a small aside.
Fabien Benetou: No it was. I assume it’s more tested on this, so I’m not going to find an expected bug that’s not going to be really productive. Okay. Otherwise, since I’m talking, I had a hand just for two quick things. One is I have some troubles. Pointing with a laser at a line. I don’t know what’s the reason, but it’s tricky. Sometimes I get it. And for example, when I expand the darker gray area, once it works, it works. And I have difficulty expressing. Yeah. How? But for example, the laser, the white laser going out most of the time I don’t see it and thus I can’t interact with the lines. Again, when I do, it does work. But
Andrew Thompson: We turned off the laser because people didn’t like it. So it only shows up if you haven’t pointed at anything in a while. It’s just kind of a guideline. It’s always there as the dot. So if you look what you’re pointing at, there’ll always be like a white cursor dot that you’re pointing to, but the laser itself disappears. If. You’re pointing to get anything. If you haven’t pointed for a while, it shows up and shows how to do it. I can turn it back on if we want, but there was a whole debate about this like a month ago. So.
Fabien Benetou: Quick my suggestion on this is that let’s say right now, from what I see, it looks like we’re waiting. We’re using 180 degrees in front of us, roughly, and whatever is behind doesn’t seem to be used. It could be used, but it doesn’t seem to be the case.
Andrew Thompson: So it spawns back there.
Fabien Benetou: Okay. Then what I would suggest is use something like literally behind like nobody would look there if they don’t really try to. And here put like a control panel so that everybody who wants to use option laser know laser whatever you would normally toggle back on and off. It’s never what I would suggest in a real piece of software, but at this stage, I find that it’s it’s much easier to have all those options as part of the experiment so that people can.
Andrew Thompson: Can you turn on debug mode? That’ll give you a laser at all times.
Fabien Benetou: And how do I turn on.
Andrew Thompson: That’s just in the menu. So tap your wrist and it’s it’s in I think the far right menu.
Speaker6: Okay. It’s so cool.
Frode Hegland: We get this 3D control bar where we have three sides and one of them is for this. We finally got to use it.
Speaker6: I’ve seen it.
Andrew Thompson: All. I remember it was a couple of weeks ago. I’ll try to find the update one that shows it off, and then it’ll show you how to grab it.
Fabien Benetou: And then a quick comment on troika. I don’t remember how, but basically my own testing in term of performance, and I think it was back then using quest two, maybe even quest one at some point I put it like 2000 lines of syntax highlighted code. So, I mean, pretty demanding. I don’t think there were 2000 references there. And there is no color coding. And I was no performance issue. So whenever I had performance.
Andrew Thompson: Was it inside VR or was that inside VR?
Fabien Benetou: And whenever I had performance issue with troika is basically because instead of doing one panel of text, I was doing a bunch of like, for example, just a keyboard actually, on the quest one I had like 30 or 50 maybe keys. And that was already problematic. They were interactive. So maybe again, it was in term of performance hit for the interaction rather than the display of it. But I’m a little bit surprised that there would be performance issue based on the huge like the wall of text I had was pretty gigantic.
Andrew Thompson: No. The question though is it 2000 troika text elements or just 2000 lines in a single troika element?
Fabien Benetou: That’s what I was saying with the keyboard versus long text. One single long text. I had no problem even something big and with colors when I had lots of elements more problematic.
Andrew Thompson: Right. So we have every line. Oh, sorry, Brandon. Go ahead.
Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah. So frequency, the number of draw calls is what’s going to kill you. And so if there’s a way to reduce the number of draw calls by bundling then that’s the best thing to do. And that might mean having to to swap and change so that everything that you’re not interacting with is one draw call versus the thing that you need to have sort of rough and ready and able to be manipulated. But that’s still ultimately going to save you more than it costs you because of the performance benefits.
Andrew Thompson: Right? Because right now we wanted every line to be interactable. That means every line is its own component. So that’s definitely what I’m talking about when I say there’s like over a hundred. Then it starts to lag. That would be.
Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah. So maybe you make three, you know, you you could like because you can actually modify what those things are. And it’s still cheaper than having a hundred different ones if you have two, which are everything but the one you’re on and then the one you’re on, then that would still be cheaper, you know? So if you manage like, yeah, you know, the entire vertical list and then you maintain the metrics for the line that you have highlighted and then just skip it in the one that’s everything else does that. Does that make sense?
Andrew Thompson: Yeah, it makes sense. Because of the amount of freedom we’re giving the user with moving things, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to implement that, but I might. I’ll have to look into it. The concept is great in.
Brandel Zachernuk: The linear list. Are they separable in space or is this I’m talking about? Like if you have a linear list that you’re cycling through being able to have everything except the current line of focus because you’re not able to move those apart, right? It’s just a fixed list.
Andrew Thompson: You can move them apart. Yeah. Everything can be, like, split apart and moved. The library doesn’t. So maybe in the library I could save some, but that’s not really the lag issue, because the library, like, hides everything else. It’s it’s like the citation lines. Yeah, I don’t know.
Fabien Benetou: So one naively, again, I didn’t see the detail of the implementation, but one way could still have like one billboard with all the lines and they’re all interactable, but you don’t make the line themself with the text interactable. But basically either a binding, a bounding box, or like a rectangle or a curved rectangle that’s on top of that thing, and it would be the same shape. It would be invisible from the user viewpoint or visible if you want it. That’s okay, but it would contain no text. And when you do the interaction of pulling it out or whatever you want, then that’s the part that’s going to move. And I, I have a hard time imagining then that people would like have hundreds of them pulled out. But then arguably at that point, hopefully we’ll have a either better hardware or better software solution or both.
Andrew Thompson: Right. Yeah. That that could potentially work. You won’t get the the text sort of bolding when you go over them anymore. But we could do something clued.
Fabien Benetou: In on top of it and still bold cloned of that line.
Andrew Thompson: Right, but then you’d have to hide the other line, which means you’d have to split it anyways. I don’t believe it lets you format pieces inside the troika text, just like all of the troika at once, I believe.
Fabien Benetou: Like I’m saying, you would clone like. .001 on top of. And I think if you just like clone a line with that new text, it should. I imagine it would be responsive enough and fast enough. I don’t think it’s huge.
Andrew Thompson: I see what you’re saying. But like with bolding, it doesn’t just expand the stroke. It like expands the spacing and everything. So it the line gets longer. So you’d see the line through the line even if it’s on top. You could like put like a solid background maybe. Yes. That would, that would obviously hide anything that’s behind it. We’ve talked about having like multiple depth layers. But for now that wouldn’t be an issue. And yeah, a lot. Lots of great points. I appreciate the discussion. If you will have more. I’m still up for hearing stuff.
Speaker6: You don’t appreciate.
Frode Hegland: It as much as I do. Andrew, I have to go to sleep soon. It’s two in the morning and I can promise.
Speaker6: You sleep.
Frode Hegland: Well. This has been phenomenal. I have written just brief notes here. If Fabian and Randall, if you could help Andrew with this particular thing. Because being an avid Vision Pro user, I’ve been using it more for work now. It is a phenomenal machine, but it’s a version one. It has phenomenal shortcomings, too. Brandon, I don’t know if you were here earlier when I pointed out that having built author provision, I realized there’s no undo. There’s no command Z on the keyboard. If I say to Siri. She says, what message do you not want to send? So that’s exciting for me as a developer. It’s exciting. So also selecting things with my eye and pinching is horrible in text and that’s fine. So what you have here, Andrew is phenomenal with the laser thing. I prefer it not on all the time. And I completely agree with Fabian. And you put it in the preferences to make it easy to switch on and off. Maybe not even a full debug mode. Absolutely agree. But the thing is, I think the three finger, let’s call it the gun, right? This phenomenal.
Frode Hegland: It is one of it’s our secret sauce. It’s such a deeply important thing. Before using the headsets in different modes, I would never have thought that. Okay, but now that we’ve tried so many different things, it’s absolutely one of the best. Whether it lines up with the finger or not doesn’t matter, as long as it’s roughly the hand and it’s consistent. Like with a real gun. You know, having been in the Army, you know, I can shoot and aim really well without aiming down the sight. Because I know where the thing is pointing. It’ll be the same with this. In the beginning. Our discussion today, we talked about growing up with certain affordances, like a whiteboard or all of these things. We are now going to be producing a whole new generation that will grow up with our affordances. So the affordance of of course, the more accurate it is, of course that’s better. But my real point is. Oh yeah, you got to go. Thank you for today. I’m going to go get some sleep in about roughly four minutes.
Dene Grigar: Exactly as we say. New Orleans better, though.
Frode Hegland: Thank you. All right just to finish this thing here with you, Andrew. So Yes. And make the. Sorry, I got a little thrown there. Danny had to leave, obviously. That’s. That’s fine. I know you have to leave in a second to. What I’m trying to say is selecting text with a trackpad in the Vision Pro fine. And the fact that it goes it fine.
Speaker6: The the.
Frode Hegland: Gun mechanism. And now I’m going to end that sentence. This is one of those affordances that we’re doing this entire project for. Because if we manage to do this really well, we’ll have a new generation of people who think that gesturing in the air means something rich. It’s just the beginning, but it’s a real thing, so it’s so important. So that’s why I hope that Fabian and Brandel and maybe Adam, he’s crazy. Holiday with the kids now can help you optimize the hell out of this particular thing. If you could please separate it because you told me you have one huge code base, separate this out so we can really work on it. I think that would be absolutely phenomenal because as I’ve written again and again in different parts of so much of my work, Addressability Addressability is not just about a hyperlinking thing, it’s also about quite literally pointing. And we are so close now to have a phenomenal pointing mechanism. So that was my way of saying thank you. Let’s refine.
Andrew Thompson: Yeah people are. I think the GitHub is now public, so people can make clones of that and their own branches and test stuff. That’d be.
Fabien Benetou: Fine. That was my next question, actually.
Andrew Thompson: The other thing is, I.
Frode Hegland: I know you got to go, but. Andrew.
Speaker6: Okay, can.
Frode Hegland: You take this bit of code, move it out, link it in so that it is just this.
Speaker6: Just this.
Frode Hegland: Object if you can do that, is.
Andrew Thompson: What part?
Frode Hegland: The pointy bit.
Peter Wasilko: The gun.
Andrew Thompson: So just like. Point at nothing. I don’t think it’s going to do.
Fabien Benetou: You a line number.
Frode Hegland: Yeah. The lines that currently refer to anything to do with the point are gone. Take it out, put it in a separate code document so that Fabian can indeed optimize or do whatever the heck he wants. Link it in for his version so that we have. You have the main code base, but this is an object. I’m not saying we have to do everything object oriented now, but this bit is so precious it could really benefit from that import.
Peter Wasilko: Gun from gun JS.
Speaker6: We’ll call it the gunslinger.
Frode Hegland: Okay?
Andrew Thompson: Yeah. We’ll see if I can get that working without too much trouble.
Speaker6: Fantastic. What was it.
Brandel Zachernuk: You wanted to say, Andrew?
Andrew Thompson: Yeah. If people are, others are working on the smoothing of the pointing, then that’s fine. I was going to say that the handshake is still a problem with the tracking. It’s still sort of jitters. The the dot. And I think I’m starting to understand why, say, in the the meta browser, the meta headsets they have, like what was a really a really annoying pointing mechanism where you can’t tilt at all. It just sort of locks it onto the panel. And if you want to grab something over there, it just refuses to let you. It’s doing that to smooth everything out. So we could look at implementing something like that too. Yeah. But the hard part is we want 360, which that completely breaks. There’s definitely got to be other methods to add more consistent pointing that isn’t so linked to the the poor hand tracking. It was good to ultimately.
Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah. It would be good to leverage the the native. It’s called the target race pace. It’s the it’s a reference that’s part of an XR input source. And it’s what, what you’ll need to use ultimately to be able to use transient input, as I outlined in my article. But it’s, it’s it’s the quest. So it’s, it’s all it’s doing all of the vending of and smoothing and, and output vector of the actual quest vector rather than the, the one that you have kind of coming out slightly at an angle, which which is because it’s system native. It’s what people on the platform are accustomed to at that moment as well. So if it varies between question and visionOS, then that’s it’s also beneficial because people are more familiar with with their OS than they’re going to be with sort of the defaults as they’re presented there. So we can talk about it later, but that it would be good to try to transition to, to pursuing a targeting vector via target space.
Andrew Thompson: I think that’s good. Because, like, while I was very frustrated with the way meta decided to implement it it has it’s I understand why they made some of their choices. So I’ll definitely look into that. What was it called again? I’m just going to write it down so I don’t.
Brandel Zachernuk: It’s called target race space. And my WebKit. Org article. Not just not just flogging it is is an outline of how to use it, how to use it. Because in transient input then it’s actually your, your eye gaze in vision. So it’s really interesting different but but very valuable.
Speaker6: I didn’t know.
Andrew Thompson: Those. Both used the.
Frode Hegland: Same email that to Andrew your article. Send it to him please.
Andrew Thompson: I’ve seen the article. Yeah. Oh you have.
Speaker6: It. Okay. Good.
Andrew Thompson: All right. Yeah. Didn’t know that. That also applied to the quest. Obviously not the eye part, but. It’s using their native pointer, which is cool. I’ll look into implementing that. I’ll try to figure out something with the separating the the pointing mechanics. Since that seems to be something people want I can’t promise I’ll have it today, but I’ll give it a shot.
Speaker6: Just for.
Frode Hegland: Clarification, Marc asks in the chat because it was a little blurry sound target ray space. Is that what it is? Oh, okay. Good. Fantastic. Thanks for that link as well, Brandon. Thank you. Andrew, thank you very much.
Peter Wasilko: Okay, I sleep well. See you next time.
Fabien Benetou: Take care.
Speaker6: Don’t go.
Frode Hegland: Hang on. Let’s just look at where we are. Right. East coast, West coast, England. Somewhere in Europe and Japan. It’s amazing, isn’t it? It is truly amazing. Brandel. When your stock options vest, please buy your personal Vision Pro so we can meet properly so you can talk to an outsider such as myself.
Brandel Zachernuk: I, I my my stock options have been we vesting for ten years. I, I just haven’t sold any because I want. I just excited to see what that how far that number goes up.
Speaker6: Yeah.
Frode Hegland: Playing that game. That’s that’s that’s worthwhile. Yeah. I mean, I was really shocked in a good way that the experience with Rob doing a FaceTime call and going through a reader document just worked. I mean, it turns out so interesting.
Brandel Zachernuk: And yeah, a shared like a, like a share play experience over an object. It’s really, really cool. And you can do it with AR quicklook files as well. So if you want to show that hamlet. No. Hamlet that Romeo and Juliet that I did, I don’t know if I sent it to you, but you know you did. You can have a couple of people kind of play with it at once.
Frode Hegland: I noticed that in reader. It didn’t want to do share play because my guys haven’t done a thing. I’m sure it’s just a toggle. So I had to do a share play with Safari or something else, and then suddenly everything I did was shared. So it did share perfectly. But you know, developers have to do some little fiddly bits, but it’s kind of amazing and I’m so grateful for the specific learnings we have in the community. Mark, what you pointed out with your problems with with working in the space today is just so pertinent, and I’m glad that we’re getting closer to dealing with some of them. But anyway, it’s almost morning, so I’m going to go and I say thank you again and same time as well. On Monday I’ll be up somewhere in Japan. But yeah, it’s worth not changing the time.
Speaker6: Yeah. Cool.
Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah. So just for reference, for your guys, it’s called share Kit. The URL is there.
Speaker6: Oh, share kit. Okay.
Frode Hegland: Because share play sounds bad because it sounds like playing a game rather than playing chess. You know what I mean? But, you know, fair enough. But share, Kit. That’s that’s good to I’ll tell the guys to.
Speaker6: Just plug it. I wonder.
Fabien Benetou: Does it work with Safari?
Brandel Zachernuk: It’s. It. Yeah. So however Shareplay stuff works. Is is is coordinated in Safari as well. But you’ll if you’re making a third party app, then you’ll want to do that right now. The Shareplay will just present us a two dimensional sort of projection of a page in Safari whereas in free form. Free form is built for visionOS, actually. So it’s it’s it’s much more intrinsically 3D. So you, you actually get it at real scale and stuff like that. It’s super, super cool.
Fabien Benetou: Yeah. I still need to read collaboratively perform. So I’ll still be up for a test and tinkering around. I think it’s like, especially for our topic. And does does it mean though, that circuit for WebEx are will work at some point? Like, could we have the experiments now that we’re doing but see each other in that sphere?
Brandel Zachernuk: Oh, that was a question.
Fabien Benetou: Yeah, maybe I didn’t get it, but share it in Safari with webXR.
Brandel Zachernuk: Oh no no, no. So webXR is a its own thing. You know, it’s a it’s a direct mode sort of interaction if you use, you know socket socket connections or or peer connections then you’ll be able to coordinate and, you know, the various nakie does that, but. Yeah.
Speaker6: It’s. It looks like.
Frode Hegland: It’s no longer a thing.
Speaker6: Deprecated. That’s the. Yeah.
Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah. I’ll have to look around to see what the most up to date information on it is. I know that third party applications have the ability to sign into these things, so I might I might need to do some digging to see.
Mark Anderson: So the future is out of date already.
Speaker6: Know.
Brandel Zachernuk: So that maybe maybe that’s an iteration of a view of this kind of mode. And and maybe it’s not publicly documented yet. I don’t know, don’t tell anybody. But no, I’m, I’m pretty sure that there are some mechanism by which people are expected to be able to coordinate these things in such a way as the third party apps will be able to do the same thing as Safari and Freeform and other things like that.
Speaker6: I do not know what.
Peter Wasilko: Guys I’m going to have to drop now.
Speaker6: Okay. Yeah. Next time. Yeah. See you later, Peter.
Frode Hegland: Look, you guys chat amongst yourself. If there’s other things, like you’re asking each other, I’m going to find this share kit thing. I’m on a mission here.
Mark Anderson: I’ve got, I’ve got a couple of quick questions in that I noticed using the current, using the current thing. A couple of things I can’t do is I can’t I always end up with the, the controller sitting really close to me, and I can’t seem to interact with it. And I’m not sure quite what I’m doing wrong. I get the impression one of the, one of the things I sense with, with the quest is that if you’re using a seated boundary, it’s actually, in a sense, set. It’s set sensibly. Except if you’re going to use hand tracking, because the hand tracking seems to assume you are at some distance from the thing you’re trying to interact with. So you run out of space, or you end up pushing out to the back. And so trying to get far enough away that the, that there’s any that the hand is seen to point to the thing. I also found that when I was in the demo today, I haven’t quite figured it out that I, I went into the demo and I saw the gray thing with a list on the left when I touched my wrist. I then got the previous demo. And whenever I, whenever I did the pinch gesture to leave the demo, I got a sort of I got the closing ring, but then nothing happened. So I at the moment it’s still running. I don’t seem to be able to escape. So whether I just need to reboot everything, it. I’m not sure that it’s because the browser hasn’t decided, although it’s I haven’t told it to do so, but it’s not actually running two sessions, so that so so.
Brandel Zachernuk: There are a couple of things there. One is because enter is not currently using the target race space, it means that he’s rolling his own logic in relation to where your head is and the objects and stuff like that are, which is much more unpredictable than using the iOS native system that you that you’re used to in terms of where, where the sort of the projective array is coming out, because it’s actually a little bit out at an angle from the the hand vector in a way that with absent a persistent indicator of that direction. It’s very hard to for me to anticipate the sort of the expected outcome of it. So I think both having the ability to have a more persistent indicator of that. Right. And also subscribing to target race space is going to help you there. On the second point about the pinching and not getting what you want, that is something that meta did recently. Rick. Rick Cabana, the DRI for webXR there has made a really neat mode that Fabian has, has exploited where so when you hold, pinch and hold, that is actually just recentering if you do a pension release then that what that does is it no longer suspends the session.
Brandel Zachernuk: What it does is bring up the two day window that happens to be it. And you can actually use both the webXR session, or you can be in the WebEx session and see that 2D window. What you don’t have the ability to do is interact with XLR input sources within that that rich space, but you have the ability to intervene on that in the event that you have 2D user interface elements on there. And that’s something that Rick is excited about. And like Sam, I think he’s a little bit I think he was a little trigger happy on, on on pushing it out without better sort of communication about what it is and isn’t doing because it’s getting in the way of your default actions there, Mark and others. Obviously it’s not just about, you know, offense. And so yeah. So it’s an exciting opportunity. I think there’s an additional sort of bunch of signaling that matter should have done in order to push that out. You know.
Mark Anderson: It’s all part it’s all part of the learning experience. So I’m not I’m not grinding my teeth. I mean, I’m mainly reporting this in the grounds, as someone who’s probably has less experience of this is in a sense that am I doing anything ridiculously wrong? Which is fine, which I’m entirely likely to do through lack of experience.
Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah. On quest, all that means is that we need to relearn that we do a short pinch in order to get to to the place where we see our window, and then we have the ability to actually exit at an earnest or we build some system within the experience, which is no longer a system user gesture, system user gesture. That allows us to actually fully exit it. So if you want to have like a burrito that you eat to quit. That’s something that actually was part of the sort of the the mainstay of user interface elements back in the 20 tens. For, for VR. So, yeah, I mean, if they hadn’t.
Mark Anderson: Yeah. Sorry. The and one other thing I’ve noticed is that I really noticed an awful lot of hand tremor.
Speaker6: At the moment.
Mark Anderson: Yeah, more than I, I would notice from my hand which and it’s partly the distance because of course, the further away it is, you know, the thing at the end of the ray that you’re pointing at is obviously moving into through a larger arc the further it is from you, which doesn’t help.
Brandel Zachernuk: And that’s, you know, that’s an on the one hand, an inevitable consequence of doing things in an uncertain environment. But on the other hand, because it’s something where Andrew has been hand-rolling the the destination target rate, then he doesn’t get the benefit of all of the logic. And moreover, the same logic that you’ve been sort of accustomed to as a consequence of using the platform. So using target rate space is essential for being able to improve the stability but also the consistency of that. So it deteriorates in exactly the same way as the system deteriorates. Because it is it is being vended that same semantic information from this system. Which is why I would recommend it.
Mark Anderson: Yeah. I’ve got one other germ to drop in, and that is through somebody in the hypertext conference has sent back to me all the JSON I did of the, of the items and he’s run it, I assume using machine learning or something. But basically he’s added he’s backed every item onto. I think it’s called the the computer. It’s It’s basically a computer science ontology TSO or CSO. And so it’s quite interesting. Every in every item now has three different further JSON keys, which are basically a list of effectively keywords. And then it also has a further dictionary attached which hasn’t been optimized. So everything has all the relevant parts of what would otherwise be a meta dictionary for the whole set. But in fact it says if you say it’s computer science, and computer science has four other meanings, I’m talking with them now to say, well, what are we meaningfully do with it? My sense is that through no fault of the ontology, it’s probably so high and so broad that actually you when you make a pretty picture, you’ll probably get everything or nothing. But it’s an interesting idea to play around with, and I will I’ll put a link to the the information anyway in the, in the slack for people to play with it. Doubtless Adam when he’s back from holidays or whatever. Tinker.
Speaker6: Yeah. Cool. Okay.
Frode Hegland: Thank you guys. See you Monday. Yeah. We’re making real, real things. And Brandon Reeder.
Brandel Zachernuk: It’s so exciting.
Frode Hegland: Yeah, it’s. Yeah. It’s amazing. By the way, as an aside, public. Oh. Oh, there you are. The public version of reader and author are available in the vision store. I’m doing an update in a day or two because some of the colors weren’t what I wanted them to be. So if you want to try a normal thing, you’re very welcome to do so.
Speaker6: Fabian. Okay, thanks.
Frode Hegland: Okay. I’m going to go sleep in about five seconds. Bye, guys.
Speaker10: Yes? Have a good rest. Yeah.