20 March 2024

20 March 2024

Frode Hegland: Hello. Hello? Are you in the lab, Andrew? Oh you’re muted. Yeah, the background looked a bit different.

Andrew Thompson: Can you hear me now?

Frode Hegland: Yeah, yeah, I can hear you.

Andrew Thompson: Got a little switch on my headset cable, and that got flipped too.

Dene Grigar: Many buttons. So you’re coming to campus

Andrew Thompson: I am, yeah, not on the lab right now, though. Yeah.

Dene Grigar: I teased you like crazy. I was writing that message to you in slack, and. And Holly and Greg said, you better put a smiley face. You send off a gruff. And I said, oh, and then. And then Holly called you absent Andrew.

Andrew Thompson: Oh, really? That’s a new one. Okay, so so the thing is last month I used up all of my cell data because I have to work through my hotspot on my phone because the Wi-Fi doesn’t work with the headset on campus. So I actually couldn’t work on campus for a while. But my cell data has been recharged this month, so I can do it again.

Dene Grigar: What’s your cell data? Excuse me.

Andrew Thompson: Explain this. Oh. So, like the headset doesn’t connect to the Wi-Fi on campus, right? We have trouble with that. So I run Wi-Fi through my phone. It generates cell data, but it runs the Wi-Fi through the cell signal. So I’ve got limited data, so it just. I used it all up.

Dene Grigar: Well, can I get you better? Can I pay for better?

Andrew Thompson: I’m all restocked now, so I can. I can do it again. It was just I was there like several times a week and it drained at all.

Dene Grigar: Well, let me repeat myself. I don’t want this to go on. So can I fix this problem for you? How much is it going to cost to upgrade you a little bit?

Andrew Thompson: I’m really not sure. I didn’t look into it. I didn’t consider it being an issue long term. How about we chat on the campus, then? I’ll see what it looks like. We might be fine. Because we were. I think that was the month that Fred was also here in person. So I was there a lot more. Usually I don’t use that much.

Dene Grigar: But we also want to get this problem fixed with why you can’t use your internet with the headset. I’m having no trouble at all with the meta two.

Andrew Thompson: I could use it at home just fine. It’s the campus Wi-Fi.

Dene Grigar: I know, but I’m not having trouble with with any of my headsets there.

Andrew Thompson: Oh, really? They’re working now?

Dene Grigar: Yeah.

Andrew Thompson: Does the one that you’re using is one of the headsets that we couldn’t connect earlier, so that’s good. Maybe that means they updated something.

Dene Grigar: Well, I don’t know, but I mean, we had the electricity down last week to do some cleanup, so they might have fixed it, but but I’m not having any trouble at all connecting. And in fact, when we did the the exhibition, I mean, we did that dog and pony show on Monday night. Had no trouble. We shut the entire portal project to those kids. Awesome.

Andrew Thompson: Well, I guess that one’s running off of a desktop, so that wouldn’t need it.

Andrew Thompson: I don’t think. How did that go, by the way?

Dene Grigar: Well, you know, sorry I.

Andrew Thompson: Couldn’t make it.

Dene Grigar: Well, that’s okay. I mean, it’s we had four people. Four students.

Andrew Thompson: That’s it.

Dene Grigar: Yeah. There were, like, entire. I mean, they had, like, a whole, like, history, art, English sociology all together. Not one person with them, not one student. So what I, what I think is interesting is that, you know, faculty donated. I spent from 5:00 5:00 till eight Monday night. Right. Plus planning before that, but three, three hours of my time. We don’t have that kind of time, right? It could have been getting ready for my I. You know, I have that book launch on Friday. I got a slideshow to fix. You know, I’ve got I’ve got an abstract due to anesthesia Psalter for the MLA. I mean, I got shit going on, right? Right. That’s insane.

Speaker4: And I might say.

Andrew Thompson: You’re saying only four students showed up for the DTC part and nobody showed up for the other part?

Dene Grigar: Yeah, I guess we might have had I mean, a business might have have might have had a few more and maybe engineering, but it was not a big show. They promised 50 people and they I didn’t see 50 people on campus at 7:00.

Andrew Thompson: Wow. Okay.

Dene Grigar: So badly done.

Andrew Thompson: So yeah that’s frustrating. It’s very hopefully this for students. Enjoyed it. I’m sure you guys made an impression on them.

Dene Grigar: Well three of them will be coming in the fall and one is going to come next year after next. So I think, you know, we’re going to get three people out of it. That’s great. There you go. But, you know, it’s dinner time. You know Holly was there. I mean, we had we had a bunch of people there. Yeah, there were people.

Andrew Thompson: Volunteering to help out than actually showed up. Yeah.

Frode Hegland: Good question.

Dene Grigar: Where’s everybody, Frodo?

Frode Hegland: I’m not sure who we’re expecting today.

Dene Grigar: Rob is here. Yay! That’s important. The party can start when Rob is here.

Frode Hegland: Haram an. Hi, Rob. Trying to see if I can. If I can measure out. Well this is okay.

Dene Grigar: We’re going to start with the agenda then. Probably ought to wait with the headsets until we get there

Frode Hegland: Yeah. I was just waiting for for us to fill up a little bit.

Dene Grigar: I don’t think anybody’s coming. We just lost Rob.

Andrew Thompson: Oh, the party can’t start now.

Dene Grigar: Gotta stop the party.

Frode Hegland: Just doing a this is just a test for your. Quote unquote benefit. See if this works. I’ve had problems mirroring screens. It seems to be working now. Three seconds, please. Oh, no. You can see all my youtubes.

Dene Grigar: Yeah I can.

Frode Hegland: Now. This is so annoying. Okay, I know. Oh, no.

Andrew Thompson: It doesn’t seem to be. Oh, there it goes.

Frode Hegland: So. So you’re saying my beard, right.

Dene Grigar: Yeah.

Andrew Thompson: Yeah.

Frode Hegland: Does that mean that But you’re now seeing Andrew smirk.

Andrew Thompson: Yeah we are. That’s a good way to present it, actually.

Frode Hegland: It’s a quite good. The quality is okay. Right.

Andrew Thompson: Yeah, the frame rate is a little bit low, but quality looks good. Okay.

Frode Hegland: Cool. I will stop doing that. That’s a good test for when we get to that point. Can I take the headset off? Yeah. Okay, so it’s the three. Three of us. That’s quite an effective group.

Andrew Thompson: Yeah. Did we scare everybody away last week? This is Nick. Well, nobody here today.

Frode Hegland: Brendel said he’s got some work events for the next two weeks, which is really quite annoying, right? And I.

Andrew Thompson: Remember that.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. And Adam just says he’s really busy. He’s been texting, which is quite annoying because he’s been going to such lengths to do nice things. But he does have responsibilities with his work in kids, so he’s answering nicely. But I still think he could be here a bit more anyway. That’s that. This is, of course, not a publicly shared record meeting. So not talking behind anyone’s back, but, you know, still wish they were here. So what I’m trying to say. Leon may very well come in here a little bit towards the end of the meeting today. Hi, Rob. Hi, Rob. Hi.

Rob Swigart: Sorry I had trouble getting everything started for some reason.

Andrew Thompson: But that’s getting lonely without you.

Dene Grigar: Glad you’re here.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, glad you’re here. And as you know, to go through our little agenda here really briefly on the visionOS software. So Denny and Rob, you have both been added to the list of testers for the headsets. I don’t think that’s necessarily been sent to you yet. Or have you seen anything?

Rob Swigart: I that confused me, and I asked Randall why I was getting an email from Apple. But then I figured it out. So I signed up, and I’ll download the software when I get a chance, but I have to leave this to go get my Covid booster.

Frode Hegland: So Covid boosters are important.

Rob Swigart: Yeah, that’s one thing after another. And I realized that I’m not going to finish my book before I travel in May, so I have to speed that up. And.

Frode Hegland: You know, just making going to make sure you both get you get both reader and author. I think there’s only author so far.

Andrew Thompson: Rob, have you talked about what this, this book you’re writing is about? I haven’t heard about this.

Rob Swigart: Oh, it’s it’s a it’s an entertainment. It’s the fourth in a series of Kindle books that I write.

Andrew Thompson: That’s fun.

Rob Swigart: But I promised the fourth one for a long time now. And. I suddenly realized that I better. Get busy. I’m two thirds of the way through.

Andrew Thompson: What, you’re excited fans waiting on you?

Rob Swigart: Yeah, yeah. They just. They’re just. Chewing on the furniture. Waiting.

Frode Hegland: I just saw something worth mentioning particular to you, Danny. That email that I sent out to everybody. Rfc, 3D one. I just got a reply without copying everyone because it was obviously ridiculous of me to share it with everyone from Marc Bernstein. So that’s a little bit of a shock. He has written something useful. We’ll read it later. I’ll forward it to you. But the fact that he hasn’t thrown us all away considering external issues is good, I guess.

Dene Grigar: Yeah. Concernings at me.

Frode Hegland: I understand you also had a discussion with him.

Speaker4: Yeah.

Rob Swigart: Somebody once said his personality had features.

Dene Grigar: I do. I mean, I said I had this discussion about Mark. Rob I just came back from Margie’s memorial, and I got to see Kate Hales was there. And Jessica Pressman. Mark Marino came up, came down. Who else was there? Of course. Stephanie. Dina. Stephanie. Yeah. Dina, Stephanie and I are staying in the same hotel and lucky fan was there also. But Stephanie and Margie and I mean Stephanie and Dina and I stayed in the same hotel and, you know, had a good time together. But it was certainly a great event. But we were talking about Marc Bernstein because Marc did not come to Margie’s memorial that was online, and everybody was shocked by that. He did not pay her any respects at all, even though she was one of his top artists. Right?

Rob Swigart: She was a formative.

Dene Grigar: Formative anyway, so people were pretty mad at him about it.

Rob Swigart: Well, he didn’t come to mind either.

Dene Grigar: We’re gonna hold a nice one for you one day. I’ll make sure of it. All right. Okay. So shall we go ahead and get moving?

Frode Hegland: Yeah. So on item number one it’s important for me that we all agree on what we’re doing, obviously. So Dean has a very reasonable request to be reading multiple documents in XHR at the same time. And this is something, of course, Andrew, that is on your list, but it’s also something that I believe I can relatively easily accommodate in reader. So it’s not an either or situation, but I think it’s worthwhile for us to do it properly in XHR what you’re doing, Andrew, but also try to work within the constraints that Apple have given us as a native app, which turn out to be really constrained. So Dean has been my inspiration for that. Now, if they have all kinds of weird limitations on windows, I found out today, but one that what we have now reader in in XHR, the new version that you guys can test is you can have single documents or two page spread, obviously, but you can also do ten pages maximum. That’s as much as the system will allow you to. But then within that you can do, you know, swiping back and forth. And I’m not sure if we’ve yet managed to have more than one document open, but these obviously will fit in an AR environment. So Dean, being our prime user tester candidate, can put them in either a virtual environment or in an AR environment. Of course, I know you want to work in a neutral environment, but with a vision right now that’s more webXR space just the way it’s built, so maybe we can find something useful there. And then briefly on author trying to build a few more features in there or sitting outside today on the terrace working. And I had an absolutely massive writing space and it was actually quite speedy with the keyboard. Typing didn’t seem to have any noticeable lag. So these things it’s nice to feel because it also brings up experiences and Perspectives on what we’re doing in XR. Any questions or comments on that before we move on? Yes. Andrew.

Andrew Thompson: Yeah, I more of a comment, but I do think it’s really interesting to see how you’re developing author at the same time, because one of my initial questions before I had joined this group, but I had heard about the project. Right. Like December I was wondering, why aren’t we making this an app? Why is this webXR if it’s designed to just run in the headset, wouldn’t an app give us more functionality? And now you’re making an app and we can see the difference. Like what they what they do better than each other. And what’s more of a struggle? Apparently the WebEx gives us more freedom in 360, and then the app has more it’s more like natural for a user because it’s built upon the OS of the headset itself. It’d be really interesting to see how many more takeaways we get as the kind of progress goes along.

Frode Hegland: The. Absolutely.

Dene Grigar: I was going to say. The other thing is that, you know, you’re working with academics, right? So it’s not like we’re working with people with a like, I get $1,000 a year for travel business cards.

Speaker4: Think, you.

Dene Grigar: Know. I mean, that’s not enough money to even go stay in a hotel for a day. So, you know, we have no money for software. We have no money to buy things. We get a computer every five years, and then it’s owned by the university. So I think one of the reasons why Sloan was interested in this project is that it would mean that academics can do things without having to pay for them. It doesn’t cost us anything, and as long as the software is free. But I’m going to be honest with you, working with Microsoft is a pain in the butt. University gives me a free copy, but the university owns my copy. And I have to sign in on it all the time. And the university has access to everything I do. So one of the reasons why I keep the old computer here is I own my software. I can write things here and I don’t have to update. Microsoft or pay for it or anything. Right. So I think there’s a lot of issues about why. Academics need something that’s free. And that’s a big selling point right now. And as long as the software is free, that’s different. But also it’s it’s when you’re working with a proprietary software, not author and reader, even PDFs. There’s there’s inherent affordances and constraints.

Speaker4: And I think they.

Dene Grigar: They tell us how to do things. I mean, it basically tells us how we have to do something.

Andrew Thompson: Yeah, you’re spot on, Dini with the open source stuff. That’s huge.

Speaker4: It’s huge.

Dene Grigar: And I mean the most faculty I know. Andrew. Or they don’t really care about how things work. I mean, they’re just like, oh, it’s just all. It’s just is it? You know, the university is buying me Microsoft. I can just write my papers. And then if they stop and think about it, they’re realizing that, oh, the university owns your papers and they’re actually looking at what you’re writing. They can if they wanted to. And by the way, you know make sure you don’t say anything that they’re not going to like politically.

Speaker4: And if you live in Alabama.

Dene Grigar: You’re a really big trouble. So.

Speaker4: Yeah, I just think that.

Dene Grigar: It’s there’s some real issues here that we all are knowledgeable about, but our colleagues are not. And we’re having to watch over people who are, who are naive and ignorant and that that’s a big that’s a big responsibility.

Frode Hegland: It is. And Andrew, you hit many nails on the head there. At the end of today, I’m going to be talking a little about what I wrote stupidly and the agenda of purpose typically as interchange notations design. I’ve had some interesting discussions on that, and that is on how to open up the data. So I look forward to that. But just the And being able to make a commercial app. Which author is? And I’ll probably keep it free, but it’s still a commercial app because it’s an Apple proprietary system, having, you know, seeing how it works differently and how it connects is important. So yeah, I look forward to testing comments from you guys. And then we have Dini book launch.

Dene Grigar: Yeah, I’m excited about that. Rob, I hope you can come on Friday. I don’t know what you’re. What? You’re

Speaker4: It’s in my calendar.

Dene Grigar: Oh, good. But I’m gonna go ahead and throw my invitation back in here if I can find it easily. But it’s right here. And I’ll drop it in our channels too. But that’s the the layout. So Michael Joyce is going to be speaking for ten minutes or roughly seven, 5 to 10 minutes. Stuart’s going to talk. Judy Malloy is coming. The editor of the book is going to kind of kick it off, talk a little bit about the book, and then we made two books, so it’s not enough. We just did one print, but we did a print book and a multimedia book to go with it. So people who are reading about Michael Joyce’s.

Speaker4: The.

Dene Grigar: Difference in loading screen speeds between the 1992 version and the 2016. Stick version. You know, we have video showing that you can actually see what we’re talking about rather than just read it.

Frode Hegland: So then it just so I don’t make a mistake. That starts at the same time as our meeting today, but on Friday. Right?

Speaker4: Yeah.

Frode Hegland: Where do I find the the link on there?

Dene Grigar: It’s right on there. It’s the bitly.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, but that’s it’s a it’s a it’s it’s a it’s an image.

Rob Swigart: You can’t copy it.

Frode Hegland: I can, I can try. Let me see.

Speaker4: I think a screenshot.

Frode Hegland: From Photoshop.

Speaker4: That I type if.

Dene Grigar: You want me to.

Frode Hegland: Typing. That’s so 20th century. Berm I. This is a. Okay, so that’s how it is.

Rob Swigart: Like you, I got it.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, I got it, too. Thank you. That was cool. The well. I will be in a car driving back from Southampton, so I’ll be very much eager to listen and pay attention for that. So perfect timing. Thank you.

Dene Grigar: Yeah. Thank you. It’s gonna be fun. And it’s a long time in coming. It’s not a big book. It’s. You can read it in one. It’s like 90 pages long. So it’s a small element book, but it’s at the same length as Kate Hill’s Writing Machines and Ways of Seeing by Berger. You know, of Rob. I always like little books. I think people will read them better. But yeah, then the multimedia book, there’s 90 different things. And Andrew did so much work on this for the flash preservation and all of this stuff. So there’s so much there. And then we have a I think the big thing is the the guiding principles for people to think about when they do this kind of work. So anyway, it’s going to be fun. Mario is coming in from Poland. And he’s going to be running the ACM Hypertext conference in November. In September. So. And we’re all going to be there.

Frode Hegland: Absolutely. You too. Rob, right?

Dene Grigar: You’re going to pull them with this?

Rob Swigart: I’m planning to be there. I have a good. Somebody beat me to my room at the end, though. I wonder who that was in Poland?

Dene Grigar: No.

Rob Swigart: In November.

Dene Grigar: There’s not any room for you in November at the at the bed and breakfast.

Rob Swigart: No, I got a different room, but somebody took my room.

Dene Grigar: Somebody took the Hemingway.

Speaker4: It’s probably me.

Rob Swigart: I’m I’m. I’m suggesting perhaps it was you.

Frode Hegland: I expect it wasn’t. And I expect to spend so little room that time there that I’m sure if it was me, we can change rooms.

Rob Swigart: It’s fine. I’m joking. It was somebody who did it through booking.

Speaker4: Oh.

Rob Swigart: Oh, Charlie.

Dene Grigar: Well anyway. Yeah.

Speaker4: So thanks.

Dene Grigar: Thanks for the heads up about the event on Friday. I’ve been working on trying to get the slide show finished and all that kind of stuff.

Rob Swigart: We have any information about Poland? I’m supposed to be a reader and I haven’t heard anything.

Dene Grigar: It’s coming along. I think he’s still working on the. Logistics of it. I’m supposed to be. We have the Michael Joyce Award that we’ve developed. Mario and I are waiting to hear if they’ve approved it. But it’ll be the best work of electronic literature. Hypertext literature. Demons got sick. She can turn in.

Speaker4: Right.

Frode Hegland: So is it only one hour? Danny.

Dene Grigar: My talk.

Speaker4: Yeah. The whole thing.

Dene Grigar: We always keep. Yeah, we keep it small.

Frode Hegland: So who will be there? Is it all online or will some of you be in the same room?

Dene Grigar: No, it’s all online. It’s all zoom. We always do a zoom book launch. We also, you know, that’s just the way we do it. It’s fun.

Speaker4: Oh, yeah. No, that’s cool.

Dene Grigar: But we try to I mean, in America Rota, we don’t do our longer than an hour meeting. We’re expected to lead, you know, limit our meetings to one hour.

Speaker4: I think two things.

Frode Hegland: I think these meetings on Wednesdays in the future, we can probably do that. The reason for the two hour meetings on Mondays is, quite simply, it takes an hour for that kind of dialog to actually get going. You know, like the last half an hour is usually when new things happen. And so it’s a huge amount of warm up time.

Speaker4: I’m normally.

Dene Grigar: Okay. So let’s continue case studies. Well, as I mentioned, I would not be getting to this till after I get past all the memorials and now I’m home. I have to say that I got home on Monday. On Sunday night, and on Monday morning, I saw on Facebook that my nephew was having a heart surgery with a brand new heart.

Speaker4: Oh my God.

Dene Grigar: They put they put a mechanical heart in him because there’s no human heart to give him. So he’s on a temporary heart. And I was like, and I saw it on Facebook and I wrote my niece and I said, what the hell? I mean, I found out about my nephew getting a new heart on Facebook. This is how you roll. This is how you do it. I’m so sorry, Danny. I’m so sorry. I should have told you. And. Yeah, you should have told me so. Anyway. He’s fine. He made it through. They they. I believe they took the tube out of his. They intubated him. So I think that was yesterday. The tube out. But I just want to get past these these events. I have other things I to worry about now. School. School writing papers.

Speaker4: Course. Of course.

Dene Grigar: Anyway, he’s he’s fine. But there’s like, oh, please God, not another one. I can’t go to another funeral.

Frode Hegland: Absolutely. And I expect Mark has been chatting to me about libraries this week, so he’s probably doing something. I’m not sure why he’s not here today. Maybe he got the timing wrong. It happens. So that’s okay. And then unless there’s something else. Let’s go into underworld Andrew world. I like that because you got a W at the end of your name. Underworld.

Speaker4: I love Andrew. Yeah.

Andrew Thompson: Just rolls off the tongue, I don’t know. Okay. Considering it’s just the four of us. I’ll just make it pretty casual. Drop me to go through the bug list again while Frodo screen shares here or whatever they call it.

Frode Hegland: That sounds so sophisticated. Let’s try that.

Dene Grigar: I’m gonna call it screen cast.

Andrew Thompson: Okay, that sounds nice.

Frode Hegland: Why don’t you But tell me what to show.

Andrew Thompson: Yeah, just go ahead and open it up for beginners. But Yeah, this week was a lot more of like since we’re trying to modify things and make changes to stuff. I had to make a lot of like fixes to underlining code because it was not originally built for some of these things we’ve been wanting to do. So slightly smaller change list this week, but I think it’s still some pretty interesting stuff. For starters, the selector tool, it’s the laser thing that comes out of your hand. The laser starts hidden. So it looks the same as last version, but it does have the laser now. So if you’re not pointing at anything for a couple of seconds, I think it’s about three seconds. But you’re making the point gesture. It will fade in to give you a bit of an indicator.

Speaker4: What is and then.

Frode Hegland: What is the. Just to ask the very first question, is that okay? Timing wise for you? Okay. What is it based on where the laser comes from? To me, it feels like it’s too much to the left. It doesn’t follow my arm, hand or finger. So what’s it based on?

Andrew Thompson: It’s too far to the left. I can’t see your screen right now, but it’s just averaging halfway between your thumb and your pointer finger. And then it points down like a natural angle.

Frode Hegland: Okay. That was not the cleverest thing.

Andrew Thompson: However, it’s very much designed for the right hand. So if you swap the hands to the left hand for the pointer it will be offset. It will look weird. It’ll work, but it’ll look weird.

Frode Hegland: One second I’m just going to share. So we’re in the same space.

Andrew Thompson: And it’s very easy to adjust the angle for that. I just put it at what felt like a natural angle. But if the group disagrees, I can absolutely change that.

Speaker4: Yeah.

Frode Hegland: I think my question is more what is it based on now?

Speaker4: I think

Andrew Thompson: Like the angle is arbitrary. The angle was just something that felt right when I was testing. The position is based on the half way point between index and thumb. But it’s a hard coded position, so it, it doesn’t actually adjust as you squeeze. So it’s not like floating around.

Frode Hegland: So you can see me now, right? Yeah. So in here I had this kind of there. And then you see that where the dot is, it’s quite far to the right.

Andrew Thompson: Yet the frame rates really bad. Oh, I see what’s going on. It’s also taking rotation into consideration. Maybe you’re not used to that. I know some of the like, say, the Oculus doesn’t do that.

Frode Hegland: I like the fact that I can move my fingers and the dot doesn’t move all over the place. That’s really, really good.

Andrew Thompson: But they did turn up the smoothing a bit in this update as well.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, no, that’s all really good, but I would like it if it’s if it was more based on I don’t know what the rest of you think, but just beginning is from from all the fingers, something more that way. So when I then do this, it’s a little

Andrew Thompson: To that do the whole thing where you point off at nothing for a little bit and the laser shows up, it might give you a better sense of what it’s actually doing. Just to make the pointing gesture kind of add nothing. And after a moment, it’ll show up.

Speaker4: Yeah.

Andrew Thompson: And you’ll see it. It calculates rotation of the hand and position. And we can. Switch it up if we need to. It looks like Tracking’s bugging out for you.

Speaker4: Yeah.

Andrew Thompson: What’s what’s going on there?

Frode Hegland: Yeah, that’s a bit odd.

Speaker4: Not sure.

Frode Hegland: But yeah.

Andrew Thompson: Like your hand is like glitching out. At least that’s what I’m seeing.

Dene Grigar: Yeah. Andrew, can I ask a question? So I’m looking at I pulled out one of them. I pulled out Thomas Gruber’s ontology of Folksonomy which has a URL associated with it. And I’m wondering, is it possible to make those URLs live?

Andrew Thompson: What do you mean, hyper linkable?

Dene Grigar: In other words, if I. I click on the link and it takes me to that space.

Andrew Thompson: So at some point I think that’s what we want to do. But the big question is what does it do? Because we’re inside a web browser so you can’t open another tab. It’ll just close the whole experience. So how do we. Like, what do we do with the link? We’ve talked about being able to link inside the library that you’re in. But yeah, we’re not sure how we want to link externally. That might not. I have.

Dene Grigar: An idea. I have an idea. So let’s imagine that I’ve got a library full of papers. Right? And I click on one that’s in my library, and I click on that link and it knows to open up the one in my personal library. If I click on it and I don’t have it, I get a message that it’s not in my library. Do I want to make a note of this URL and download that? That article and add it to my library.

Speaker4: That makes sense.

Andrew Thompson: Yeah. Having the note come up would totally work. I don’t know if we can automatically download it because of security issues. That would essentially be creating a virus.

Dene Grigar: No one could imagine downloading it in the headset, but imagine that I can then.

Speaker4: Oh, yeah.

Dene Grigar: Do it later. My note I’ve got the URL sitting there. I can go and get it and add it to my library.

Andrew Thompson: Yeah, that’d be really nice. I don’t know if we’d be able to get that working very fluidly, because we need so many things on, like first to get that running. But it is possible. So this is it’s like so far down the development route.

Speaker4: Yeah. Right.

Frode Hegland: It’s just this is how reader works. So that’s why the visual meta and all of that is relevant, because in a PDF that has visual meta, the reference section is normal, but there is also the reference section in the visual meta. Right. So that means that and I know this is of course on the Mac platform rather than webXR. So it’s a big difference. But the logic of what we already have now is if Dany is reading a paper that cites a paper that she already has because it’s in her field, a reader will know that. So if you first then click on the number in the document that indicates a citation, you get a little pop up with title, author, and date, obviously. If you then click on the title. If she has the document, it’ll open the document instantly and to the cited page, because the visual matter includes the document name and page number. If she doesn’t have it and there is a Doi, it will follow the doi. If there’s no Doi, it’ll do. If there’s a web link, it’ll do the web link. If there’s no web link, Doi or anything else, it’ll just do a Google search based on the citation information.

Speaker4: So this is.

Frode Hegland: Why we experimented a little bit with architecture in the beginning of this, of having a way where this data could be stored so that in the webXR environment, all of these PDFs could be uploaded with a JSON describing what they are. So that what we’re talking about now is possible. I think this would be this should be a priority, but most certainly not quite yet.

Andrew Thompson: Yeah. I’m not disagreeing with you on the principle behind it. It’s more of the sense that since this whole thing is running in a web browser, suddenly we can’t do web stuff, so we can’t open it in Google. We can’t, like, open a new link. None of that works, because as soon as a new tab pops up, the headset closes. So we need to find some other route. We’re kind of doing everything in one space, right? So if we’re going to a link and reading it, that works, we don’t even have to download it. It’s all online. But we have to account for the link being just the document, like just the HTML page, because of how we’ve been working on it so far. Unless we change routes again. And there’s a chance it’ll work. And there’s also a chance that it’s totally wrong format. And then we just get an error. Which we can show to the user. But the vast majority because there’s no consistent form yet. So we just decided to go with ACM. So all the ACM papers should work. Outside of that, people are going to have different naming conventions for their documents. And it’s really just going to be something that’s unreadable by our software, at least right now.

Frode Hegland: I hope Danny agrees with me that for this stage in September, only working with ACM papers is okay.

Speaker4: Yeah.

Frode Hegland: So I do think this is becoming very, very important. And actually, considering there’s only the core group here. Denny, what do you say I spend a few minutes on the whole interchange thing so we can go back to Andrew, because I think this is very relevant to what he’s talking about now.

Dene Grigar: I do. Let me just say one thing. What would be really nice for the for the ACM conference, for a demo is for us to have An example of what it’s like to have all the articles that I need in my personal library. So I have a folder called Dinis Personal Library with all the ACM papers that I need. Right. And I’ve got I pull up an article that has these. Articles referenced. Right. And we can show that we can go from this document. To the library and back. And then we can we can move things. We can, like take references out of the library, out of the article, and make a second paper that lists them so I can have it for later. Save it. So I can think of about 2 or 3 little activities that we could show that would be very useful and kind of like, awesome, like, would create all awesome. With our colleagues. There are some folks that I think will be a little that we there are people that are going to be thinking what we’re doing is pretty cool, and there’s going to be people that are very skeptical. So, you know, Marty is going to be very supportive. But we also have Alessio. Alessio is going to be the other spectrum, right? He’s going to be the more skeptical, like why is this important? You know, what are you trying to achieve here? And I see him as a keeper of the flame of ACM anyway, so he’s gonna be wondering, like what? How is this going to help ACM? So I think that’s a conversation we should be having between now and September. It’s like, what exactly are we showing? And all of that’s within the confines of the Sloan Foundation grant. So nothing is outside of that.

Speaker4: Now, just.

Andrew Thompson: One last thing to sort of jump in before it has this little demo. I think maybe as a group, we’ve overlooked something more immediate. Because there’s been a lot of talk the last couple of weeks about, you know, September and when we’re actually presenting and all that, and that’s great. But the demo that I have right now only shows the citation page, and we need to start talking about what else to show, because just showing citations, it’s got some cool functionality, but it’s not what we want. So we need to actually be like, how do we want the rest of the document to be presented? We want just all the text at once. We probably don’t. That’d be too much. So I’m just kind of I think that’s a great question.

Speaker4: I wanted this.

Dene Grigar: Article up there, so I was just mentioning the reference because that’s where we were. But I imagine we bring up an article, right. The one that I want to demo, and I’m able to move through the pages, you know. And then I’m able to find something in that article. Tap on it and bring it up. Annotate so I can make notes. So note taking this is this is why I’m making that case study. Right. So by the time I’m finished with the case study I’d say May 1st is my goal to get it done. You’re going to have exactly the roadmap for what you’re building for the the conference.

Andrew Thompson: Yeah. And especially I’m talking even just visually like how do we want this to look. Is it just a bunch of text again on the black background that’s not black background gray? That’s fine if that’s what we want to do, because that keeps the style we’ve been going for. But obviously a paper has so much more text than citations, and the citation block already takes up most of our vision. How do we want to read an entire document? Well, I think we.

Dene Grigar: Mentioned before that we wanted to have a choice, like like someone like me. I don’t want a background, but someone like Frodo might want a background. So you can toggle between. A couple of different, you know, experiences, right?

Speaker4: Working in the venue.

Dene Grigar: Working in the Hawaii, you know, working on the water. You know, I’m sitting on a boat, you know, I mean, that we can make a couple of those available. But frankly, I think the people we’re dealing with are not going to care about that. They just want.

Frode Hegland: Text. Did you mean under Akron in the environmental sense, or did you mean right behind the text when you read the document?

Andrew Thompson: I’m talking less about background at all. That was more of just a comment of right now we have a blank space which works well for reading a citation block. But if we say that the simple choice, which is not what we want to do, is taking all of the content of the document and importing it with exactly the same styling as the citation block. The font would be too big. It would completely and utterly fill the screen, and no one could do anything with it. So we would need to find a new way of presenting it. I know there was an old design you had Frode of kind of like a windowed with like different things on the side. And I think the citations were supposed to be one of the corner pieces if I’m remembering correctly. So I assume in the middle would be the main body of the document. And that’s kind of been the mental image I’ve had for a while. But when we put the citation text into the headset and tested it, you kind of needed it a bit bigger than we originally thought to be able to comfortably read it. So if we keep that same scale with the block nothing fits. So we do need to do some talk about design at some point.

Speaker4: Yeah. Rob.

Rob Swigart: That from what I’ve seen, the the curved space is difficult. To actually read because it goes it runs off the edge. And when you put a citation out there, it seems to me that it’s all on one line. Which makes it very long and it goes off on to the left. So I think that maybe there should be some constraint on the width of these. That’s actually pretty.

Andrew Thompson: Easy to add. I got a wordwrap.

Rob Swigart: I think that if they wrap around and they’re in a in a fairly confined space, it’d be a lot easier to access them, even though you won’t get so many of them vertically. Just a thought.

Andrew Thompson: Yeah, it’s a good thought. And I can absolutely implement a word wrap in the next update. That’s a good idea.

Speaker4: Yeah.

Frode Hegland: Those views will have to discuss. So It, right? So many important things there when what I see the work is being. Yeah. Please.

Rob Swigart: Yeah. Just one other thought. The in the headset, the the dinosaur the 3D dinosaur thing is in a large window that is clearly marked as separate from whatever the space around it is. And that seems to me a very good. Implementation of having a view on something different from what you’re looking at. The document space is a little amorphous because it’s curving. And I kind of understand why it’s curving, but. It’s not very intuitive. I like the idea of having a big window into a space where you’re working on stuff. Even if it fills the whole screen.

Speaker4: Yes. The curve.

Andrew Thompson: Yeah, the curve was a result of US testing because webXR resolution is much worse than the base headset resolution. So if we just originally we did just put a block further out and you couldn’t read anything. Because there just wasn’t enough resolution there. So we brought it closer. But then because it was closer, anything that went flat further out was at an angle to your head, and you couldn’t read that either. So now suddenly we’re like, well, that only leaves us with a curved space that has a readable distance at all times. We can, of course, revisit some of those earlier ideas, because we were pretty quick to dismiss them as soon as we saw that it didn’t work. Instead of being like, well, maybe we change font size and whatnot. We’re just like, well, it doesn’t read well. Moving on. And it’s actually not that difficult for me to add. Kind of like a setting to turn the wordwrap off and not the word wrap. Sorry. The curve. We don’t want to give that to the user, most likely, because just the way it’s programed. Turning off that rap. Adds a really janky functionality now. So when you’re trying to swipe, the whole thing is like really bad. But for us, testing just visually, it wouldn’t be that hard to turn on.

Dene Grigar: Hey, Leon.

Frode Hegland: I just gave you a link there. So so many things we’ve been looking at primarily interactions with the references in a kind of a spherical, cylindrical XR environment, which is going really, really well. And today in the discussion it’s come up issues of how to read documents as well as, you know, how you do connections and things. So it’s all very relevant to a lot of the, a lot of our activities. So Rob, absolutely everything you’re saying makes complete sense right now. We’re kind of as I see it, we’re kind of in references mode, learning how to do a few things there once we are in reading mode. And I don’t even know what I mean by mode, but I don’t necessarily mean a huge change. But when you’re doing a reading activity of the document, absolutely. We will have to look at different displays and so on. That is really important. Now. One thing that Leon and I have been talking on and on about this on and off about this week, is relevant to the view that Andrew has built. Where. It kind of started with early in the week. I ran my thesis through LMS, Claude whatever, asking specific questions, and it did a quite a good job. I then asked her to extract the visual meta metadata without teaching it what it was, and because there’s a little bit of a description at the end of the documents, the LMS figured it out, put it in any format I wanted.

Frode Hegland: That was really an interesting breakthrough. So there’s been some discussion this week about how to share things. And Leon and I have kind of been going further and further out on a limb at this point. What I think is really, really important is, first of all, that we can share things, right? That and this is the way that I like to picture it. Let’s say Rob and I are in a coffee shop and we’re disagreeing about a sci fi story or philosophical issue, something that we both worked with in our own spaces. And Rob gets a bit annoyed with me and he says, well, you’re looking at it wrong. So he then does a thing that in my headset I can see his view of this information, and that is of course parsed according to my underlying LMS, because in the very near future, everybody’s going to have their own LMS, everybody’s going to have their own parsing agents. That’s just pretty much a given, right? So we need to keep that in mind. You don’t have to necessarily have a data format where a single comma can destroy everything, like the past has been. So we’ve gone a little further. And what I really think is important about Andrew’s environment so far is that everything in there knows what it is. Right. So when he when we pull off a reference, that little bit of reference should know what document it came from at least.

Frode Hegland: So that we will then be able to export that entire view. And we can include one line of layout. We can say this space for the sake of argument. None of this is set in stone. This is all being discussed. We define the space as one by one by one. We don’t say if it’s a meat or a kilometer or a light year. It doesn’t matter because relative within that you have worse. Some things are. So that’s nice, but that’s not really the key. The key is that let’s say there’s the name Rob Swigart on there, right in my world, that can contain an insanely huge amount of information behind it. When I put it there, what was happening, you know, things we’ve been talking about in this community for years. So when I then give it to Liam through whatever means and let’s, for the sake of argument, call it, just copy and paste. As long as I don’t mind it because I control my own data. All of that goes along with it. That is really, really important. So what we’re talking about the ability to copy knowledge objects. And no one in the world is going to write a taxonomy that’s going to be perfect for everything. So that’s the whole point of this discussions. You know, generally, how should we put things in there? Right? Yes, under.

Andrew Thompson: I think we can probably tie this back into some of our older discussion about libraries and how we wanted to have for like, you know, some base libraries you can start with. But as soon as you start to make changes, it’s now your own library. And you can, of course, save those changes, which would include layout what you have open at the time and then export that library as some chunk of data. How we want to send that data is just totally up in the air, because that’s not hard. Principal is easy enough. You could even just upload it to some server and then whoever wants to see it say, Rob, in this case goes and visits that link or downloads it or something. That’s not that out of scope. We’ve, we’ve talked about having the libraries already, so stacking on a bit more data is fine. And the things you’re mentioning I’ve already kind of done everything does know where it is. Everything knows what it sources. So that’s already there. I just don’t have a way yet to export and retrieve it.

Speaker4: That’s wonderful, Andrew.

Frode Hegland: Really wonderful. So if you. Underlying things that here’s something that I find is a bit mind boggling. That is, you can embed a prompt with the data. So this kind of testy stuff here, here is an example node. It uses our BibTeX style and it has color shape author title all kinds of stuff. Right. Also refers to time periods. So this could go on a timeline whatever. It’s just there. But then here is kind of key. The prompt is included at the top of all of these. That means how it is intended by the creator of this to be interpreted. So that is a prompt that I have used to test this using cloud. And it actually managed to render something. It’s a little bit insane. So you know, that’s all good and can be all over the place now. Dini. Hang on. I lost you guys. Dini talked about being able to read a document in there and do something, and you get another document and the references and stuff. That is, of course, the golden moment of this, right? So this is why it’s so important to look at the kind of library thing, just as you mentioned, Andrew. That’s exactly what it is. So ideally and this is why I’m making all my own software available for testing so we can have more than one user environment. So, for instance, my reader library, as you all know, is just a folder.

Speaker4: I would be.

Frode Hegland: Very happy to add a Jason in there as well, that you can use Andrew for whatever you need to know about these documents. And I do think that even though Dean is going to write proper scenarios, I do think the act of a PDF presented flat. As a beginning thing is really beautiful and powerful and evocative, because if you then interact with the citation and you start building the space. But this is not a dead space. These are knowledge objects. It can get very, very interesting. By the way, two more references before I ask for Leon’s comment. Number one, I’ve been discussing this with the inventor of CSS, who had a long phone call with him yesterday, which was really fascinating. Talking about extending CSS into 3D is not entirely convinced, but he’s Norwegian and apparently a good friend of a close friend. So that was fortunate. Fortunate not that we’re necessarily going that route, but it’s great to have that kind of people involved in our dialog. And do. Some of you know about Tana, the knowledge? It’s a bit like obsidian and all of these things, but Tana is one of the big new ones. I’m seeing him tomorrow for a coffee. The guy who started that, he’s in town. So. And more people are being able to throw their pennies worth of perspectives into this, which hopefully means that as we start implementing, we’ll have more buy in because they’re part of the dialog. Any questions or comments before we might get over to Hungary. Hungary. You are live for ten points.

Speaker4: Thanks.

Leon van Kammen: Hi, everybody. Very interesting stuff which is being discussed right now. I actually yeah, we had indeed some conversations and Andrew actually said something which was was actually really cool. He basically talked about libraries, so plural. And I, I suddenly started to realize something. And thank you, Andrew, for that. Is that so, so I basically work also with 3D scenes, and I usually build a these days I automatically build a word graph based on the textual data which is inside the 3D document. And because with that word graph, I can easily, automatically make connections between things. So it’s a very poor, poor man’s way of correlating things. But when you said libraries, I was thinking, yeah, that is really great. If if we just assume that users have their own libraries of knowledge or PDF documents or whatever, then maybe if we want to send some some kind of small graph to somebody, we could like Frode says, we could just basically have that that graph, maybe it’s just a couple of words automatically sort of correlate with the libraries of that user. So, for example, if I send Frode a small graph of how Andrew and Danny are pretty involved into XR and, and I send this small string of text with a maybe it could be even text. I send it to Frode, then maybe Frode can say like, well who are these people? I don’t see anything. What is this? And then I can tell him, like, oh, wait, how how about you view it with this library? And then he basically imports some kind of library. Or maybe he accepts somebodies an invite of a library, and then suddenly all kinds of other connections can be made to that library, which perhaps makes then more sense.

Leon van Kammen: And so I was actually, for me, the, the epiphany here was that Not so much data has to be sent. Actually, if if there’s also going to be other sources to correlate with. And I think that’s a very powerful idea. And I think what fraud also added to that is basically that perhaps not so much conversions have to be implemented manually. Let’s say normally if you want to sort of share something and you want to render something, you have to think about the input formats and output formats and how it’s a lot of coding steps. And what what I think is interesting about Freud’s approach is that perhaps it is a bit it’s way too much work to think about all these things if you know, an LLM, LLM could also be used as, as a translator at some point. So I think, I think I, I could imagine and sorry for this long story, I could imagine betting on two horses where you basically do one sort of simple sending and loading of, of a small graph data which can be rendered maybe just JSON or something. And on the other hand keep in mind that this This sort of import export process could also be proxied in the future by some LLM and have all kinds of other conversions to other formats, which, who knows, might be easier to format in the future. So yeah, this is a lot of ideas, but now my mind is empty. And thank you for listening.

Dene Grigar: Always a pleasure.

Frode Hegland: So Not in summary, but to simplify an aspect of this because Mark has asked some good questions. The library is a collection by whoever of whatever. This is really important. We could have called it a collection as well. There are many could have called it a box. Many things we can call it. Maybe we change our mind. But the thing is that this. Collection should be able to include not just documents, but also single words. Huge pieces of metadata and also LMS and prompts. So all it needs to be is some way of saying. Here is a feature of text at a library or whatever we call it. With a little sentence underneath saying what it is because they I will be able to understand that sentence, which is the weird part of the world. And then receiving systems can choose to interpret it or not. So that means that the Disney dream also goes into I really, really want to be able to in reader for vision. I want to be able to support a thing whereby Danny is reading a few documents, she comes across a thing, most likely a citation. Clicks, gets a little pop up. All that is fine, but you should have the option to open that in what Andrew is building. Right. And then we have. So basically, I’m very glad you’re here, Leon. Basically, I can imagine we have a special series of links that encodes a lot of where it came from. Right? So when she follows that link, it’s not just a dead link, so to speak, into Andrew’s world, but it communicates to Andrew what to do to set up in there. Right?

Andrew Thompson: Yeah. So we can’t quite. Just by default, have a link open, like like, oh, any library application opens in our software because we’re just a URL. But we can deliberately link to the page with data. That’s absolutely fine.

Frode Hegland: So, Denny based on that, I’m going to interrogate you because you are the key user in the room. If you want to be able to read a PDF in a rich way, and then see and follow citations and the rich things, right. So knowing that text rendering is better native. How would you like to this to divide the the workflow. How would you like. To start reading. How would you like? What do you give us a richer sense of what you want to do?

Speaker4: Please. Okay.

Dene Grigar: Well, let’s just go through a process. Right. And I’ll. Let me talk about the process I use now. And then I can talk about the process of planning. This is part of the case study. Right. So this is what I’m talking about in the case study. So I’m reading an article, right? I pull it up and I’m reading the article and I’ve got a piece of paper or something, a notepad next to me, and I’ve got my laptop elsewhere. And I’m taking a highlighter and I’m highlighting something. And if it’s a book, I’m highlighting with the book highlighter, right. If it’s a print book, I’m highlighting underlining. Right. And I want to take notes. What I truly do right now is I, because I don’t like the way indexes are done by other people. I like to make my own index. I open it up to the front of the book. I write down the key word that I’m looking at and a page number. Then I will make a note like this. Like a note for like this reminds me of blah blah blah. I might say something about how I want to use that note on a on my notepad. Turn on my laptop and I type out that note, I annotate it, I actually write it out with the page number. So it’s a process. And I go through the article just like that where I’m taking note, I’m highlighting, indexing, making some sort of intellectual comment over here on paper a note, but I’m typing up the copy here. Say it again.

Speaker4: That was weird. It was weird. Anyone made.

Frode Hegland: That sound on.

Speaker4: Purpose? Okay.

Dene Grigar: Anyway, that’s. That’s what I do currently. And so that takes. You know, quite a few devices to be able to do that. But I’m imagining with the headset I’d be able to do is I’m looking at the text up here. I’m able to highlight in some capacity right turn it yellow or whatever color. Move it out over here. So it’s I move it out over here, which is where my references would be. I don’t have to retype it. It’s already typed for me. And I can go over here and make my note and it’s all there together.

Speaker4: That’s right.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Please learn new stuff.

Leon van Kammen: That. That is a really cool process. Actually. I maybe some other time. We should also talk about how you got to that process. I’m really I’m I’m should also more think in in that that way. I was actually curious. And this is a question for Andrew is that if for example, Houdini was talking about taking things out of a document and maybe using it elsewhere like, what are your, your thoughts on this kind of almost cross document working where you have one document here, one document there, and things are moving from here to there? To me, that sounds like, like a bit challenging as well because we’re focused on sort of like rendering and reading PDFs and going sort of out of the document to another document that’s a whole other thing. And I was curious, like, are there yeah. What what are your thoughts on these things? I don’t have any big answers here. So. Sorry. But I’m just curious about what your thoughts are on that or how careful we should be with thinking to crazy things.

Andrew Thompson: Yeah. So it’s definitely we’re not there yet, but I’ve been making every piece sort of modular under the assumption that we will be importing multiple things at once. So the idea of having multiple different documents open at the same time that should absolutely work in the end. Because right now the citations are all I have, but they have their own source and they remember where they came from. So in theory, I could load up several different citation blocks, and they each have their own source document, and they’ll still open their own things without getting confused. So that that’s like the principle of it. I haven’t tested that yet because I don’t have the initial part that launches multiple spaces. But conceptually, yeah, I think we’re on track for that. My bigger concern, honestly, is just performance. Because even already, as the citation blocks get bigger on some of those larger documents, we have just 40 on the default one. But if you put in a different URL with a larger text block Some of them do start to hit frame rate. Which is a little bit concerning to see already. So we’ll we’ll have to kind of keep an eye on that.

Frode Hegland: The default headset we’re using is the Vision Pro. It’s not Oculus. It’s nice that it can work on Oculus, but for a demo in September, it’ll be headsets. It’ll be the visions, which are a bit more powerful.

Andrew Thompson: How that’s running on the browser still. So we’re still limited by that?

Frode Hegland: Exactly. It depends on what how much of that power is available in the browser? Exactly. Okay. So as we often do in these talks, we go down different holes, rabbit holes or whatever. Dini, how do you feel about the relative importance of being able to interact with a reference section in a document versus the documents itself at this point?

Dene Grigar: Why is it any either or?

Speaker4: Because.

Frode Hegland: The opportunities for both are massive. And it’s also the question of native versus webXR or where to spend the time. I hope you can test readers soon so you can see reading there and get a feel for that at the native resolution compared to reading in our environments and webXR, and also how they can connect.

Frode Hegland: Now, just to ask you, Andrew, let’s say that we either know.

Dene Grigar: Let me go back and we’re not finished yet. I mean, I want to go back to your question. I mean, it’s not to me. It’s not either or. I have to do both. Right. And so the question is what are we going to prioritize? Like what’s first? What’s second. Right. That’s the question you’re asking. Right okay. That’s a different question okay. So if I’m going to. Pick one. I’m going to pick the article. I mean, I’d like to look at the references. It’s important to see who who they’re citing. But that’s not where I work. I work in the in the ideas, which is in the text. Right. And then I look at the references, I go back. So I forget to prioritize. Then I want the text first. Yeah, that makes sense.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. It makes complete sense. Yeah. No, both are important. And I’m grateful that you said that priority. So I’m gonna ask on this. Ask Andrew a few questions. Let’s say that we, we know wanted to have. A couple of to begin with. Just two page spreads of a couple of articles in the space. What level of work is that for you? Do you think?

Andrew Thompson: I mean, that’s that’s so vague. I’m not sure you’d be. Just have two bits of text next to each other.

Frode Hegland: No, no, what? I’m. Yeah, you’re very vague, but imagine through an opening system or just a default. You have a PDF, two page spread, you know, rendered as a PDF nicely, and you have your beautiful gray bar on the side and you have, let’s say, three of these so that they can be moved around in the environment, just like we can with the references now.

Andrew Thompson: Yeah, I’ve got to get to rendering the text block itself first. I’m not sure exactly which part you’re asking about. Having multiple of them shouldn’t be too bad once I get one of them working, because I’m building everything modular. So if I can get one working, having multiple should be fine. But I don’t have the one yet. So let me think about that. You want? He said. Formatted nicely. Since we’re now referencing.

Speaker4: I just mean.

Frode Hegland: I just mean a PDF that can be read nicely. Not not not redone anything, just the PDF in the view.

Andrew Thompson: I’m kind of just like talking development thoughts out loud because I don’t have an immediate answer and I don’t want to just give you silence. So right now we’ve switched from sort of rendering a PDF as it appears to re rendering stuff with troika text, which gives us much crisper results, but we lose the formatting. Visually. Right. Because the ACM papers that have been converted to HTML, which is our current source they don’t look like a PDF, they have the same content. So if you want it rendered kind of like that, that shouldn’t be too difficult. If you want it to go back and look like the PDF looked I have no idea how to even start with that because we’ve already moved away from it. We can go back to that. But the big issue we were having with the PDFs were like getting the text to look crisp enough and also be in the correct place. We like we’re getting one or the other. For most of our tests. So if you don’t mind the layout, we can create our own layout to make it look really nice. Kind of take the the reader principle. And have it be like, as long as you can read the content easily. That’s our goal. I think that’s the direction we started to go. And I do like that. Then this shouldn’t be too hard to do.

Frode Hegland: Okay, so Dini, what is your preference out of the option of saying a PDF rendered as a rectangle with a white background looks exactly like a normal PDF, or having the text rendered as text in the environment.

Dene Grigar: I love getting away from the idea of a page. I mean, that’s the other thing, is that we’re trying to imagine what the world’s going to look like in, you know, ten, 15, 20 years. And I would like to think that we’re going to be leaving. The 2D environment. Behind. I’ve been aching for this for 30 years, you know. So, you know, the losing the paper metaphor, I think is cool.

Frode Hegland: Okay, so that means that we have it seems, agreement that we don’t need to worry about the current look of the PDF, because ACM papers should be good enough to be renderable either giving us HTML or PDF. That’s parsable. So we will work within that constraints. Okay. So that’s good. And then we also will make the assumption that we know what the abstract is. So if we choose to only show that level of the document, that should be possible. Now, one thing I would really like, which is the whole connectivity thing, is.

Frode Hegland: So the DNA within what I’m doing outside of webXR with author and reader, you should absolutely be able to do most of what you said. I have a few documents up, view them whatever way you want, highlights, and also copy into author to write your notes. Let’s pretend that works flawlessly. And let’s pretend you are in that environment and you’re happy working. At some point you will want to view it in a 360 environment that is being made here. What might be the action that causes you to go into that environment? And what would you like to see in that environment?

Dene Grigar: I would like to think that just automatically appears to me.

Frode Hegland: But it’s not going to be there at the same time. So you have to. It has to be something, you know, if you the thing is, if you even now you can download reader. It’s available at a certain level and you can read and it’s really crisp and clear and beautiful. That’s possible now, but at a certain point. Because that’s going to look better than what we can do in webXR. Just for the sake of argument you’re doing. You have a document here, you have a document here. And now you need more thinking space. You click a button or whatever it might be, and now you’re in a webXR space. What do you want to see the original documents in a new view or what would you want?

Dene Grigar: Okay, so I’m imagining I put my headset on. Let’s start from the very beginning. Put my headset on. I access an article, right? I bring it up on webXR and I bring it up right, and it’s in front of me. And then I think, you know, I’d like to also look at the. Let’s say it’s let’s go back to Bernstein. It’s Bernstein’s article, or let’s say let’s say it’s Marx and Dave Miller’s seven types of hypertext. I’ll bring that up. But I also want to bring up Siren Shapes by Michael Joyce. All right. I’ve got that in my library. I bring that one up because they reference it and I want to see I want to see, you know, what the difference is because because Joyce talks about two types of hypertext. They’re talking about seven. And I want to think across these two texts. Right. And I’ve got them in front of me. Now I want to make notes. And this goes back to your question, Leon. I want to make some notes in the moment. You know the this siren Siren shapes article talks about these two types, and this fits in with this particular type that Mark and Dave are talking about. And make that note over here. All right. Then I go back into the two two articles, and I moved to the reference area for Dave’s and Mark’s, which is what, 150 references. And I go to Michael Joyce and I look to see what, what where they got that version, because there are several versions of that article too, right? The original, the one that’s posted in the book, republished in ACM. And there’s all these different versions. Which one are they referencing and which one? Which 1 a.m. I looking at? Right. And I make make that note. But then I also pulled the reference out over here, and I have that sitting there. So that’s what I’m imagining doing. And that’s going to take space. Right? I mean, I’m looking at the space I’ve got right now. You can see there’s the end of that table. Goes all the way around.

Speaker4: Here.

Dene Grigar: I’m in a lot of space right now and I can’t work. I mean, I watch people work on an iPhone. I don’t freaking know how to do that. I do not know how people do it on an iPhone. I do not know how people work on an iPad. I need thinking space. And so I want that same environment out there. I’ve been waiting for a long time. And so the reason why I’m interested in this project is we’re inventing it. We’re telling we’re making it possible for people like me to work like this. Leon, how do you work? Are you like me or are you? Can you work on small spaces?

Leon van Kammen: Yeah. That’s a that’s a that’s a good question. I, I also don’t know how I can, I cannot really type very fast on mobile phones. So I quickly get annoyed and hunt for some kind of keyboard, and I I. I do have some Phases of processing certain information, I usually send it to my. I call it a joy box or a letter box where I collect all kinds of links. And that is kind of a sort of annotation and source, because that’s what I started to notice from your story for you, annotating something. And, and but also keeping the source some kind of source or reference is goes sort of together. I think that’s something what I’m missing because I’m, I’m more like bookmarking something. But then later, I’m not really sure anymore. Why why I bookmarked it. So, so to annotate it and have the, the source in my case, the bookmark is, is is a good combination, I think. Yeah, I should do that as well.

Dene Grigar: Let me show you something. Let’s see if I can pull this out. You get a good example of what I’m talking about? I’ve got so many. I mean, pick one. That makes some sense.

Speaker4: Here we go.

Dene Grigar: So this is Lansdale’s hypertext book. Rob knows this one well. That’s my that’s my index. My personal index. Right. And it goes for those two pages.

Speaker4: Here.

Dene Grigar: Their third page. And then I have. These little tabby things on three different pages that are important. And then I have a whole document where I’ve outlined this book in two pages. That way, when I want to write about it, when I want to include it, I don’t. I mean, I don’t have to go digging for that information. I can just copy and paste it off. My doc and I do this all the time. So all the books that are important to me. I do this and then I, I make a summary of the book with page numbers and major quotes that I think are important. And just let me finish this thought and then I’ll turn it over to you. Proto, I mean Anti-platonic and Anti-aristotelian, pages 60, 101 and 102. I found that important at that time period. You know, talking about. Although hypertext theory has begun to begun and deconstruction, Derrida does not end there. This is my response to it. Like what? No, it’s not all about Derrida. So anyway, so this all turns into an annotated summary. And I’ve cited this book so many times, I can even such a page numbers. Now, I don’t have to look at the book.

Frode Hegland: That makes a lot of sense. Okay, so I want to share this real quick. So here we have the seven hypertext paper and this bit here I find I want to comment on. You can see it. Right. Deanie.

Speaker4: Yep. Right.

Frode Hegland: So I just copy as a quote, either by control clicking and choosing copy quote or command shift C, I then go to author and paste. So now it’s pasted as a citation. Yep. So that means that when I’m done I export this as a PDF. Anybody else will be. I’ll show you. Because this we can also do in our the environment we’re building, which is the whole point of it. I’m not trying to show you something old. Yeah. So if you look at this. And now we have that quote and it has the number 11 click on it says 11 hypertext. You click on that because it’s in my library.

Speaker4: Well

Frode Hegland: It’s not opening. It should open. Well, okay. I don’t know what happened in that particular instance, but the whole point is. It should open that document to that page. That’s very odd. Anyway, you see the point that I’m making, right? That if you write in an environment that knows what things are, those links that you’re making should be able to be. Live.

Dene Grigar: Okay.

Frode Hegland: Just going to try another test here. Do.

Dene Grigar: And while you’re doing that, Leon, one thing I’ll mention is I have an eidetic memory, which means I remember things really well, which is a curse and a blessing simultaneously. And so when I write things down, I remember the page. So I can go right to the page again. So the writing down part is important. The typing part is important that Cairo I call it Cairo memory. Right.

Frode Hegland: So what? So what we’re talking about here is display addressability and connections. Right?

Speaker4: Well, okay.

Frode Hegland: What is the feeling in the group of how we should divide things versus. Actually. Yeah. Leon, please go first.

Leon van Kammen: Yeah. Sorry. I’m not sure if I’m hijacking the agenda here today, but to maybe conclude the the DMs workflow. I have actually seen something which might look like that without introducing an extra tool. And this is perhaps a suggestion to keep in mind we could use the clipboard. You know, the copy paste clipboard as a the notebook Denny was talking about, because I have recently or I have experimented with a alternative clipboard manager, and I will quickly share my screen now. And it was basically basically all my ever copy pasted stuff as a list, so. And I could edit it, it was called copy queue. And it looks a bit technical here, but let me find a normal screenshot. Well, yeah. Here, here, you can perhaps see it a little bit. Let me so here you can see two items which were recently copied by just selecting the text. And I could just click these items and I could add some, some data to it if I wanted, and that it was, for me, a very interesting approach where the clipboard suddenly became a sort sort of notepad or to do manager, almost because I could also drag it to a certain category. So it was almost like a email inbox or something. And I thought yeah. Well, listening to Denny and thinking about VR, I was I could, I could almost imagine some kind of you know, your PDF and if you would select a text, it would pop up this list of recently copied things which you could enrich, perhaps a bit, and then maybe paste it into something else. Yeah. It’s just something which, which came into my mind. And sorry for hijacking the agenda again.

Frode Hegland: No, no, it’s highly relevant. Thank you.

Speaker4: So.

Frode Hegland: The questions then, particularly to Dini

Speaker4: But what?

Frode Hegland: Considering the way you work. To be able to copy things and have them link back to their original location. Is that useful to you? Oh you’re muted I think.

Dene Grigar: Yeah, I had an incident happen recently. I was I had made a curatorial statement in the next. And I realized when I was borrowing it for the grant I was writing that I had failed to put the the page number where I’d gotten it, which is, you know, plagiarism, right? You know, like, plagiarism, like, what the hell? So I went back to look for that in my notes, because I have outlined that entire article, and I realized that I didn’t even put the citation in my notes. I, I’ve not done that. So I had to go dig for it. I found that it’s now sitting on my desktop. I went back, fixed the curatorial statement, added that all to my grant proposal, right, for the Andy Warhol grant. And but I had to go back through and go back to the original place where I’d written it, go back to my notes. And kind of dig backwards. And this happens a lot, you know? So yeah. Does that make sense?

Speaker4: It does.

Frode Hegland: So if we look here at this Schneiderman paper. Right.

Speaker4: Just.

Frode Hegland: I’ll do keyboard shortcut. For some reason, it works better. Copy that new document. It’s got the reference. Export it. And you know, I’ll close the Schneiderman thing.

Speaker4: Click here. Boom! There it is.

Frode Hegland: Oh, yeah. No, it’s just a weird slowness because of my hard drive. So it comes up to the right page immediately.

Frode Hegland: You know, this is visual meta powered. I think we should use more of that in what we’re working on. I think that being able to copy things usefully across domains will become quite important. Then I’m addressing your your workflow here.

Speaker4: I can’t hear you.

Dene Grigar: I’m listening. What about my workflow?

Speaker4: No, it’s.

Frode Hegland: Just it’s been a bit frustrating. Not. Not with you, but it’s been been frustrating with our building, with priorities and so on. Because a third of the Sloan thing is, of course, visual meta, not financially, but in terms of bullet points. And there are really interesting and useful things that can be enabled with it. But we need kind of workflow support. So this is just one thing it can do. It can do the kind of copying that you said you wanted. So I’m wondering with what Andrew is doing and what Leon is. Oh, you got to go, Rob.

Rob Swigart: I gotta go. This is this is great. I.

Speaker4: All right.

Frode Hegland: Look forward to Monday.

Rob Swigart: Heckling? Yes.

Speaker4: Say that.

Rob Swigart: By Friday.

Frode Hegland: Monday. Of Friday as well. Of course, of course. Separately. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. No. So so I just mean, I think we should really take into consideration how the information flows, because a lot of the things we want to enable comes into this. But I want to just move bits on a screen, you know?

Dene Grigar: What do you want to do? Let’s start with what you want to do. Instead of asking me what I want to do, how do you want to move forward? That would be very helpful and that would save us a lot of time.

Speaker4: No, I want to.

Frode Hegland: What you did now as a scenario I think is perfect, okay. And I want to support that, okay. Because I think it is useful and it is a real academic workflow. So I think these are the kinds of things that can help make that happen. And that’s why the discussion also rightly on moving things about because in an abstracted way, what I read, what you’re saying is which part of the agenda we are. Mixed because there’s so few of us today. Leon, we are mixing the interchange stuff we talked about with Andrew. If you want to go to the beginning of the notes here, there’s a link for you to try on the headset if you want what Andrew has built, which is really cool. And sorry, just to go back to address what you’re saying, Danny what I see is you want to be able to read lots of different things of relevance and a really useful way, and you want to do active reading, so you may want to this you haven’t talked about today, but I think you have before, not just a dead PDF, something you can get your hands in, understand it, maybe rework it. You want to be able to see the connections. At the same time, you want to be able to not just put it in your head, but also note down things about it. And that’s where this special kind of copying comes in. Because if it copies, knowing where it is, that can really help that.

Speaker4: That I want.

Frode Hegland: To deeply support. I think we should do that. I think that’s going to be the core use case. But furthermore, I think that the next step would be logically, not logically, but kind of sequentially would be.

Frode Hegland: That you can copy not just a thing, but a construct of things. And that’s what I’ve been talking a little bit with Leon about. So you made this space that helps you understand, and you want to be able to share that with someone, not just flattened. So you should be able to put that into some note as well. And the final bit of the puzzle I think will be very exciting is that when you’ve constructed this view, you put it in a thing. Someone then reads it, starting with an HTML or PDF or whatever. The system knows what you put there so it can open it up dimensionally again, that that’s this we’re aligned on. Right.

Dene Grigar: What seems to me the difference between the PDF and author reader is that PDF has a limited amount of metadata associated with it, and what you’ve done with Author Reader is you’ve beefed up the metadata so that it’s much more robust. Right. And so the problem we’ve got to solve at some point, if not this year, but next is how to beef up the metadata in a PDF. So that it can be readable and experienced and transferable across headsets. Am I am I understanding that correctly?

Frode Hegland: 100%. And this is why I’m so glad to have Leon expanding my mind, because Marcus had some really interesting thoughts on kind of decomposing a document to understand it better. Or I use the term exploding, but he was a bit more intelligent about it. The thing is, even if you’re talking about a rich environment, all of it can be written down in plain text. You know, plain text is obviously amazing. So I absolutely what you’re talking about. So. So what I’m hoping we can do is get to a point where in a PDF or HTML or whatever kind of document in the appendix at the back, there’s some amazing shit happening. So when you read the documents, you, you know, when you go in and this is where we’re all so passionately on the same page, a normal page will probably be 2D forever. It’s useful for that, but you should be able to explode it into all kinds of things. And that’s what’s so exciting to talk to Leon about, is we can either invent a hard coded language for all of this, which will be really difficult. No one will adopt, or we can have an approach to noting it down, giving some prompts to LMS and within our own systems in our community have interpretations for how to view that.

Dene Grigar: My question. Then a follow up question is how fast do we want to have this in place? And what is what’s possible by by September. So it’s possible by November.

Frode Hegland: So what I already and Andrew, I know you’re very good at listening, but this particular bit is for you as well. So what I already have in Author Reader Mac, is what you saw. Obviously, it allows you to have three different things on the clipboard. Normal copy copy is quote and copy is citation, meaning you don’t see it, but it’s all there in clipboard that is. This week also been implemented in reader for visionOS. So that basic stuff I think we can do in in what Andrew’s building as well. We have to decide what is useful because it’s actually really simple.

Speaker4: It’s really.

Frode Hegland: Really simple stuff and I don’t want Andrew to waste any time working on this now. I think the community needs to to think about these things as experiments. And we can experiment without anything to do with Andrew. Andrew just needs to be part of the dialog, you know, have a full say, obviously, but but the idea is that to copy and paste out of his environment should be a rich thing.

Speaker4: At some point.

Andrew Thompson: Just I do copying and pasting from is probably possible. It’s not going to be smooth, unfortunately. Because you’re going from inside an experience to outside, so you might like. Copy something. And then when you close the webXR experience, it’s like a big block of text or something sitting on the web page, and you can copy from there. If we really think that’s important. We could look into that. I guess that would be one way of like sending the library, I suppose.

Speaker4: So to think.

Frode Hegland: About this as kind of a library is a very logical thing to do. One of our original discussions, of course, was that extra JSON bit and a folder on a server or whatever that describes the library in basic terms, such as what documents are hidden, which ones are favorites, and that kind of stuff. What I’m thinking about more, Andrew, is let’s say because you’re building this in a beautifully modular way. So here I am. I got references for one document here, another document over here, which we’ll have at some point. I can see relationships I move things about. I really build a very, for me, a very useful view of these things. I want to be able to then copy in the loose sense of the word copy. It might be sending a message, it might be whatever. For the sake of argument. Doesn’t matter. I want then to send that to deny. Either in a document or as another kind of message where she can reconstruct that view.

Andrew Thompson: Yeah, I think that’s the library export though, right? I’m not seeing how that’s different from the copy and paste idea you’re pitching.

Frode Hegland: It’s not you’re absolutely right. And I’m very grateful that.

Andrew Thompson: It’s the same thing.

Frode Hegland: Yeah I haven’t thought of it as the same thing, but logically it absolutely is. But you know, in addition to you know, let’s say. Let’s say Danny has made a mind map to shift a little bit of electronic literature. I’m now writing the end of my thesis and I need to learn more about electronic literature. She sensed that to me. I put it into this environment, and it may appear just as a few text lines, but there’s a lot of metadata behind it. So that’s the whole point of whether that saved us adjacent library or copy and paste doesn’t matter so much as and we need to be able to interchange these knowledge spaces, not just individual pieces.

Dene Grigar: Let me reiterate that what we really want to do is share information. The whole point of academics is to share information, right? We create new, not new knowledge. But there’s no point making something new if we can’t get it out there. And we disseminate in various ways. Many of us share our preprints. So in other words, when Dave and Mark wrote that article, right, the seven types of hypertext, they sent it to me first to go through it and edit it all the sections on electronic literature. And I gave them lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of notes. Right. Then went back through and I gave them also references, but I gave them a lot of notes and they went back and changed it. So the version that we’re looking at now is different than the two versions that we went back and forth with. So and that’s those are preprints, right? They’re there before they go to press. Now we’re looking at the print and we got to share that too. So we share information. And you’ve been part of the of the readings of grants in the lab where I read the grant out loud. I mean, that’s a preprint, right? I’m reading out loud on zoom and you’re all telling me, no, that’s not exactly right, or fix that here, or that’s it’s actually HTML five, not JavaScript that I did that in, or you know, that that’s not JavaScript or that’s CSS. And I make that on the fly. By the time I’m through talking to you and Holly and Richard and Greg and everybody, it’s a different grant. And at the end I share the grant. It goes into our base camp and it’s there for anybody else. And I’ve actually shared grants with people so they can take pieces out of it. And so there’s a whole kind of interesting process that that happens. Now, Leon, you’re asking about where we were in the agenda. We’re kind of at the end and a few minutes we’ve got to do a wrap up, because I’ve got to get to the other meeting, too. Leon, what is your Go ahead.

Speaker4: Yeah. A quick.

Leon van Kammen: Question. Like is this demo a distraction from the roadmap? Because a demo I just heard the word demo. And I also know that, you know, the grant has all kinds of milestones and steps and things to be achieved. In in what sense is a demo a distraction? And in which sense does it completely align with the milestones?

Frode Hegland: The demo is the milestone.

Dene Grigar: It’s the same thing.

Speaker4: Yeah.

Frode Hegland: And it’s very important because it’s there. You know, there are three parts of the of this grant. Number one is dialog obviously number two and three a little bit of visual meta and the coding. But number one is the dialog. So the community effort is absolutely crucial. It’s not just the book and the symposium. It’s also what you are doing here. Now. You know. And if you want to be written into the papers about this, you’re extremely welcome to be part of that. But if we just go in and put one thing and we’ve done one thing, that’s really, really to me, not very exciting. We want to convey how the community is trying to do things, how this is just like Denny said, this is not a CD-ROM, which is kind of an information ghetto. This is an approach to information that uses open information. Acm. You can do amazing things, and the result of that can be shared in an open, useful way. Like we’ve been talking about a little bit this week. So so the demo also sorry just a little bit technical also community. And finally it’s theater. It needs to inspire. Sorry Denny please.

Dene Grigar: No that’s perfect. No, but but Leon. What? What we are. What’s due in September is written in the grant, right. So we know what’s due. And but when we when we say it’s due, we’re going to demo it. We need to have some sort of, as he said, theater involved in it. Right. So we’re not making something new for a demo. We’re taking what we’re making, and we’ve got to make it make sense to an audience for the first time. Right now, we’re our own audience and we know where we’re headed, and we haggle over things and all of that. But basically, we we do have a roadmap going forward. But we what we want to do at the conference, though, is to make it palatable so that other people can understand what we’re doing. So if there’s buggy stuff that we’re still not working out, we probably will nix that from the demo. If there’s stuff that’s really working well. And we have lost lots of stuff working well right now. We’re going to enhance that, right? Just to make it more palatable. So I think that’s the way to think about it. And, and Frodo’s use of theater, I think is, is the good sense. We want people to put the headset on and go, well. We’re not going to make anything that’s not in the roadmap.

Speaker4: Yeah.

Frode Hegland: And also, when it comes to theater, that does not mean faking in the sense that it can’t happen. It means faking where we need to and to show we have perfect metadata, which could happen if the world listens to us. So it all has to be possible and it has to be possible. I think Fabian had a great sentence on Monday where somebody goes into this and they’re able to have a realization, they’re able to have a bit of an

Speaker4: And one.

Frode Hegland: More thing. If we don’t want to just have one thing on that day, we want to have a series of things now. Andrew has saved all of his work up to this, so of course people can go back and look at stages. But also if it turns out that two of the things we want to build don’t yet function together, that’s okay. Ideally they would.

Dene Grigar: I just dropped in there on the invitation to the book launch that’s taking place on Friday, and this is a perfect example of what we’re talking about. You know, I co-wrote a book with a Polish scholar, Mariusz Pisarski, and then we also made a multimedia book to go with it. Now, those are two very academic things. And what we’re not going to do is pull up the book and show pages out of it. That’s not very exciting for a group of people online in zoom, right? So the theater part of it is yesterday I spent some hours working on the script. And we have 15 minutes to present our books. Right. Actually 20 minutes. 15 on the print and five on the multimedia. And so I wrote a script that only highlights certain things that we think that the audience is going to. It’s going to resonate with the audience. There’s like billions of things in the book, but we’ve picked out eight slides and eight slides, and every slide has something visual with it. So we’re not just talking like this. It’s like here’s, you know, when we’re talking about loading screen, you know, and emulations. Here’s two examples. Right. Here’s an emulated screen. Here’s one that’s original and the video recordings of them. And you can see it while we’re talking. So the the academics are I should say, we should be good at theater because we do this so often at a conference or a book launch in this example.

Speaker4: So.

Dene Grigar: That? Does that make sense? I call it a dog and pony show.

Leon van Kammen: And and in this respect, doesn’t it make a lot of sense to not do a live VR demo projected on a screen, but just some kind of presentation, perhaps with some screen captures of VR where you can see somebody so that the people can really imagine it. And at the same time the tech doesn’t have to be perfectly working. So, for example, this whole sharing idea can just be perhaps

Speaker4: Just.

Leon van Kammen: Only implemented on a gesture level that you see something move or something, but not on that it’s actually sent to another people over internet or something.

Dene Grigar: I’m going to let Andrew answer that in a second, but I’m going to say that there’s a big difference between watching a video. And putting the headset on and being inside of it. And I think part of the wow factor is this experience inside. And I say this because on Monday night I did a demo of the portal VR game that Andrew led the development of. And this the kid that had it on the headset was like, oh my God, oh my God, this is so cool. People watching was like, oh, this is really cool. As soon as they put the headset on, I was like, oh my God, that’s so cool. So it’s it, it’s the immersiveness. So I think, you know, watching the demo, when Andrew does it on the screen or it’s fun to see it, but when I put it on, it’s like I’m where I’m, I’m, I’m embodying it. So it’s the embodiment of it. So Andrew, go ahead. I’m sorry to say that.

Andrew Thompson: Yeah. I mean, it’s absolutely correct. Leon, I was getting the feeling you were talking about during the demo. Because I think we’re going to have the headset available afterwards for people to try out. When we’re up there talking, I think the discussion is between having it prerecorded versus us, like demoing live. I think we should pre-record it as a backup, but there’s definitely a charm in seeing the person up there doing it live to show, like, hey, it actually works. We didn’t fake it in any way. So I would say we should try to do it live if possible. But of course, recording is the backup if the tech isn’t working.

Dene Grigar: And it depends what kind of paper we get, we have to turn in. We have to, like, write the paper so we can write a blue sky paper. We can do a demo. If we do the demo, it’s going to be like last year that when Andrew and I had the game and people just came and played, right. So we can do it that way if we give a formal paper and talk about process. And that all of us are involved in it. It gets to be a published paper. Then we will present the paper. And I think your idea of a demo behind us as we’re talking makes sense. And then at the end we say, okay, so now we also have a demo that you can come and put it on your head. I’m imagining that what we also have to do at the conference is test. We’re going to use the conference as a way to test people’s responses so we can fine tune. So we want the demo for sure. So that people can say, you know what? I actually want a tree in my background. I don’t like this gray stuff that Deeney likes. You know, I want to sit in the forest and work, you know, I mean, that’s the kind of stuff we want to hear.

Frode Hegland: Talking of Deeney likes at just this minute. Got an email that the test flight is ready. Deeney for reader. So you can open it in your headset and you know, just play the user guide isn’t very good yet because I can’t test it myself because I don’t have an American account that I lost my test flight app, and Apple is trying to figure out a way to get it back to me. That’s a bit ridiculous. Anyway, that’s the world, right? Yeah. So the day will be some kind of presentation on stage, but also really important. Someone puts their headset on there and Andrew World and they can actually make sense of stuff.

Dene Grigar: Okay. My cat’s biting me. It’s that time of day. I’m gonna go put him outside. Come on, let’s get you outside. Come on, come on, let’s go. You’re such a monster.

Speaker4: So

Frode Hegland: To reiterate something Denise heard way too many times. Andrew and Leon. The the reason I put my own software in the headset is a to learn and B to connect, because it represents an external thing. So in addition to the whole space, I really think we need to be able to have a thing in Andrew’s world where on the options, when you click on it, one of them is copy. And then you go somewhere quite different and you can paste that. And the whole circle goes around, but that is for later. I think we’re now very much in the display space rather than the connect space. And now in our last few seconds. Denny, what do you think? Andrew should work until next week, getting the PDF text rendered nicely, or some more tweaking for the references.

Dene Grigar: And what do you want to work on?

Speaker4: Good question.

Andrew Thompson: I was considering adding more snapping distances. So say we have like 3 or 4 default snap distances. And you don’t have to keep, like, moving the slider every time. But I realize. The extra snap distances won’t be that helpful until we have multiple things rendering at once, so maybe this is the wrong time for that.

Dene Grigar: Can I ask you a question? How hard would it be to have a a highlighter implemented?

Andrew Thompson: Oh, I had a highlighter before. We didn’t like it at the time.

Speaker4: But may we may want to bring my highlighter back. Okay.

Dene Grigar: Okay. Are you taking over, Frodo? I’ll stop.

Speaker4: No no no no no I’m not.

Frode Hegland: I just want to ask. What do you mean by highlighter? I just want to show this while you’re talking. The view of of Andrew’s work. Danny, what do you mean by highlighter?

Dene Grigar: Well, you know, a yellow highlighter that highlights text.

Andrew Thompson: Yeah, I actually had precisely that. We can go back a couple versions. It was before the selector. Actually, like. Was a pointer that opened up options. Originally it was just a highlighter tool. And it. Yeah. It wasn’t the smoothest thing.

Dene Grigar: Well, let me say this. Let’s look at that. Look at Frodo. Go back to references and just show the references. That big giant page. Just stay right there. Stay right there. I’m looking at that. I’m going. Okay, I really want to focus on sup? Sup? Sup? Sup sup? Stop, stop. Okay.

Speaker4: I’m not doing anything. Really.

Dene Grigar: I want to, I want.

Speaker4: To, I’m not moving.

Dene Grigar: And. I want to highlight Jay David Bolter and Michael Joyce, hypertext and creative writing. I want to highlight that. Oh, I want to go down. Okay. I now want to highlight Dave Millard. And I just I don’t want to move anything out of the text. I just want to highlight the text. I don’t want to move anything. So I’m imagining in that menu we’d have a fourth item highlight.

Andrew Thompson: Oh yeah. Like a, like a mark button or something. That just changes the color of the text.

Dene Grigar: Yeah, just change the color text. And yellow is a normal color. You can make it green or whatever you want.

Andrew Thompson: We can have a little menu that opens up so you can pick a color or something maybe. Yeah. In fact options.

Dene Grigar: In fact, it’d be kind of cool to make it yellow. And then if you click on it again, then you’re able to move it. It turns green. It moves. So yellow is like it’s highlighted. Green means it’s movable.

Speaker4: I’m not sure about.

Frode Hegland: The yellow and gray text. Are you thinking about a yellow box around the text, or are you thinking a yellow dot next to it or.

Dene Grigar: No, no. Imagine you got a green. You got a highlighter pen. Like I use. Here’s one.

Speaker4: All right.

Dene Grigar: So yeah I go across the line so it all stands out from the thousands of lines there I highlight things. And then it stays highlighted. I might highlight five things, and then when I go back to that text, it’s there and I can do something with it. I don’t have to go in now. What was that number was oh, that was number 22. You know, I want it to stand out for me. I want things to get easy. I don’t want to reread something from start, start to finish once I’ve already read it.

Frode Hegland: That sounds reasonable. What do you think, Andrew?

Andrew Thompson: Yeah, I think that sounds beneficial. And I’ll mess with the colors. Right. I’m not going to just slap pastel yellow onto gray. You’re hardly going to be able to see it.

Dene Grigar: See right there. That’s highlighting. Yeah.

Andrew Thompson: Yeah. Are you talking changing the text color or adding a background behind the text because one of them is dramatically easier than the other.

Dene Grigar: Whatever’s easiest.

Speaker4: Which one is easiest?

Andrew Thompson: Changing the text color.

Dene Grigar: Make it. Make it easy.

Speaker4: Okay.

Andrew Thompson: I can.

Frode Hegland: Sorry. Yes.

Andrew Thompson: It bugs out sometimes getting like Height and distance for some reason. I think it’s a troika thing. I’ve been trying to find a smoother way of doing it, but it’s been inconsistent from my testing use, but I know I can do the text color easily.

Dene Grigar: Change the text color and make it blue.

Speaker4: And that makes it look like a link though.

Frode Hegland: I’m wondering what about only highlighting the the number and the square brackets? Or is that not enough?

Dene Grigar: No, I want the whole thing. I want it visually easy to see. So if you can change.

Frode Hegland: So when you say the whole thing just to narrow it down, do you mean the entire line or maybe.

Dene Grigar: The whole line? That’s how I, that’s I do the entire line.

Speaker4: Yeah, but hang.

Frode Hegland: On, hang on a second. What about name, title and date? Because a lot of the URL stuff. Do you really need that to be bright as well?

Speaker4: Well, let.

Dene Grigar: Me ask you this. If you’re asking me what I want, and I’m telling you and you’re fighting against me, can I just have a whole line? Why do I have to compromise?

Speaker4: Oh, no, Danny, I’m not.

Dene Grigar: I’m just saying, give me what I want. I’m an academic. I earned it, for God’s sakes. Just the whole thing in a color. Pick a color. I don’t care if it’s blue or green or yellow. Just pick a color that I can see. Probably green. If we can’t use blue. And then Andrew would be nice on the menu to make that possible there. Right?

Andrew Thompson: Yeah, I think the pop up menu is a very logical place to put that. I know the meeting’s almost done here. A. Did anyone have any comments on the rest of the change log? Because I never went through it. I wasn’t sure if people have actually any feedback for me before I go into the next week of development.

Speaker4: Yeah.

Frode Hegland: I would like to have maybe the, the bar, the gray bar on the left, maybe not be visible until you point in that area, because after a while, there’s a lot of gray bars in the space. That’s something to consider. I don’t know, what does everyone think of that?

Dene Grigar: That’s fine.

Andrew Thompson: It might be hard to find if you don’t know it’s there. But. It’s a good point that it could get cluttered quickly.

Frode Hegland: Well, maybe we can have a thin, thin line at Gray Line there. And when you point in that area, it goes wider.

Andrew Thompson: I like that, yeah, thin. And when you point out it gets wider. That’s that’s a good one.

Dene Grigar: Okay, we got a buzz, Mr. Frodo.

Speaker4: Okay.

Dene Grigar: Very fruitful meeting.

Speaker4: Yeah.

Frode Hegland: That was good. Okay, well, have a good weekend, everybody. Except for the few minutes on Friday where we will be in the in the book launch. So see you.

Speaker4: Later on.

Dene Grigar: Down to my book launch. Leon, I’d love to see you there. Bye bye bye.