24 January 2024

24 January 2024

Dene Grigar: Rooms and. Your room for the hotel and your conference fee.

Alan Laidlaw: Okay.

Dene Grigar: Hey, everybody over there in California. Rob. Good morning.

Alan Laidlaw: No mics are on.

Dene Grigar: You’re muted.

Frode Hegland: Sorry we’re only Rob so we don’t have too much going on. In fact I don’t think you need my video either. That’s a that’s better. But now I can be part of text and fun things. Yeah.

Speaker4: Happened to my video.

Frode Hegland: What happened? So Yeah. Today writing and Yeah, everything is going. Going good this side.

Dene Grigar: That’s good. Well, have you been? We missed you on Saturday. On Monday?

Speaker4: I I showed up and nobody was here, so I logged off.

Dene Grigar: I was here the whole time I got here early. We were here, we had.

Speaker4: Seemed like nobody was there.

Dene Grigar: So no, I was here.

Speaker4: I started because he was traveling. It wouldn’t it wouldn’t happen.

Dene Grigar: No, we go ahead and meet. We actually just kind of did a run through the first hour of, of just kind of talking about who we are and what we’re interested in. And then we shifted to a discussion about gestural communication and that kind of stuff.

Speaker4: Like waving.

Dene Grigar: Yeah, well, you know, the, you know, you you might remember Eric Loehr’s lawyers work that he did with the leap motion controller in which you had to move your hands a certain way over the controller, and certain actions happened on the computer. Right. And so if you did this, this. And even in the motion tracking experiments that Steve Gibson and I did, we connected gesture like thinking about the kind of I don’t know, automatic gestures. We make and connect that with things that make sense. So when you put your hands up in the air, the volume would raise. If you put your hands down, the volume would go down. So using the metaphor of up and down for volume and pitch. You know, just those kinds of things that people have been thinking about a long time. And I dropped a reference in the slack channels from Fernardo Polyidus, who did a really great article, a book on gestural and non-verbal communication.

Frode Hegland: Is. That’s it. We have a cockerel next door, guys.

Speaker4: Here we do.

Frode Hegland: It’s been trying to tell us it’s morning for the entirety of the morning. I thought it was a.

Speaker4: I think it’s a pet for the girl.

Frode Hegland: Or, you know. Oh, there they are, guys. So, Alan, where are you? That looks like a new place.

Alan Laidlaw: Was that to me?

Frode Hegland: Yeah. It looks like you’re in a different location.

Alan Laidlaw: Oh, no, I just I’m a foot three feet away from the desk. Just my chair.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, okay. So not not the same level of movement about. So in terms of structure for the Wednesday meetings, it’s quite clear to me that we’re going to do a lot of user stories and really focus on that level of looking at things. I’m wondering if there’s been any discussion maybe on Monday on how to to spend the time and organize the time.

Dene Grigar: Because I promised you we would not talk about the project on Monday. We did not talk about the project. We’re not going to talk about the project on Monday. We’re waiting for you to be here. Yeah, we’ll talk about it.

Frode Hegland: That’s fine and that’s good. But so Rob and I were lucky enough to have dinner with Brandel yesterday, and family went to a wonderful Turkish place and talked about all kinds of things all over the place. And he when he talked about the Gutenberg thing, he’s been reading in the headsets. He had this sentence that I think is very interesting for us, questioning what’s the medium, what the book wants to be, you know, very mcluhanesque question to begin with. So I’m wondering, it seems to me, Alan, that the user stories are user driven. So I’m wondering time wise and structure wise, how we can also do the opposite, which is have discussions that are opportunity driven. It’s like, oh, this is possible, how cool is this? And just have that happen and then have the Twain meeting at some point. I don’t know what the thoughts are on that.

Alan Laidlaw: I can say a couple thoughts. What I’d like to go ahead.

Dene Grigar: I like to circle back and remind us all that we want to focus on the project on Wednesday, and we want anything that Andrew and Adam have done since Friday to be like front and center of the morning. And also Frodo, you and I talked about not having this discussion till you got here. We onboarded, but if you want to open it up before we get here but we talked about you and I meeting first and spending some time going through foundational materials and all of that before we bring this up to the crowd again.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. I mean, throw.

Alan Laidlaw: In something.

Frode Hegland: Just to reflect back on Denny. I’m not saying we should decide anything hard and fast now, but it’s it’s just good to have some perception perspectives on this so that you and I know what to talk about. That’s all I’m looking for today.

Alan Laidlaw: I’d like to add something that In. Cooperation. With what? Everything. Everything’s being said. I think it’s Good and necessary, even whether it’s on boarding or not, just to have some open conversations about how we. Imagine this project will work and the best way to work together. And being a really Honest about the facts of life, the constraints of this project, the material constraints, the time and constraints and ability constraints. There’s a lot of aspects of this that make it totally different than the normal project, at least to me. Dina, you may have had experience of this kind of thing before, and this may be like, all like, I know, I know this is how this should work, but If that’s. If that’s not the case or if we’ve had various kinds of experiences, I think it would be really good. Whether it’s this week or not. But before we dig into user story things is to really try and soak up and absorb who we started to know who we are when we talked on Monday. But like if this is going to go on for two years, there’s a pace and an assumption that is imagined, you know but if there’s also the factor of that, there’s not a lot of money involved, like, this is not a full time job. Then then there’s a passion project aspect to this that is a reality, right? There’s the reality of where vision is right now, those kinds of things. I’d love to just talk about that with the purpose of, with the goal of how can we have the most copacetic two years or the most, you know, copacetic couple months before November. And then we like, have a we go like, okay, boom, this is going to be a couple months where we know ahead of time that it’s going to be urgent and we’re going to figure all this stuff out. I love those kinds of talks, and I think those are more important and in fact, are necessary before user stories can even be explored.

Frode Hegland: I’m sure Dean has a comment on that particular point.

Dene Grigar: Actually, I want to hear from you.

Frode Hegland: Sure. Okay. So, you know, the question is partly, what are we going to talk about today? And of course, I agree with Dini that we’re not going to plan how to run this today. That’s the whole point of me coming up to Washington to meet the team there and organize that. When I was kind of rushing into as I do, was this sentence that Randall said yesterday. So I just wanted to hold a candle for we need a way to write stuff down that may be irrelevant or not. Not Monday level stuff, because that’s anything with text. But just as some of you may have seen on slack, I’ve started a document where I write down, hey, we should do this. Hey, we should do that. Hey, that’s possible. And I hope that when you feel like it, you will send me articles in whatever format of the same type this is. These can be edited to go in the book. They don’t have to. But it’s really nice to get these raw, naive childlike ideas before we run into more specific things before we run into. Yeah, I.

Alan Laidlaw: Agree with that. I actually mentioned last week sometime that that could be in a category called Open Sorcery, just to sort of, like, keep the Harry Potter vibe of, like, hey, wouldn’t this be great? You know, and then and then it’s, you know, doesn’t the stuff may fold into scope, but it’s assumed that it’s not even in scope, it’s just adjacent to or inspirational or in a similar way, I’ve been keeping a or building documents that I call a friction log and attraction log. Of the VR experience and, and, and the non VR experiences that are assumed that the kind of tools that are being used by our current target user. But so yeah I agree with, with the documentation side. And we still have things to figure out on that part to make it easy and open for everybody to add to it.

Frode Hegland: Okay. It seems all of us are on the same wavelength of this. And once we have a structure, once we decide exactly how to use the time. I mean, one thing we have decided is that Wednesday the beginning will be the 18 showing what’s going on. They will be. That was very odd. Audio. You can hear me.

Alan Laidlaw: Yeah. I don’t know what that was.

Speaker4: Yeah.

Frode Hegland: Sorry. Anyway Yeah. One thing we have decided is that Wednesday, the beginning of Wednesdays, the A-Team will show what they’ve been working on. You know, weather. And of course, sometimes that’ll be. Oh, we haven’t made any progress. Nothing to show. Fine. Right. But if that is the kind of the slot to for us to review. So. Under Adam Andini. That’s our schedule, right?

Alan Laidlaw: Was that discussed or was that decided on?

Frode Hegland: Danny, you’re kind of coming in and out. Your video looks very arty farty. As in broken. We can see you’re waving.

Speaker4: She has her hand up. Okay.

Dene Grigar: I can try to come out and go back in, but before I leave. Can you hear me?

Frode Hegland: Now we can. We can hear you. Can you hear me? Yes. Yeah.

Alan Laidlaw: You might want to take the video off, though, because we can’t hear you now.

Speaker4: Okay, let me hang on.

Frode Hegland: So we all just log out as a joke.

Speaker4: You should remember to log back in. Yes.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. And before Danny comes back, I do believe that that is what Danny said. Her suggestion and it all makes sense for all of us, right? We start with a period of time. For that.

Alan Laidlaw: We should discuss it.

Frode Hegland: Okay, but what is your perspective on it then?

Alan Laidlaw: I’ll wait for Dina to come back. I messaged her about it and I I think it’s a good, maybe just a pet example of of how to how to work together on things. Right. Wait for her to come back. And I don’t have a dog in the fight. I just am, you know, and if my opinion is not wanted, I can shut up. But I’ve worked with a lot of teams, and I found that showing your work every week leads to shallower. Shoddier work. At times because the developers are now wired to what they can present. And they’re not thinking about. They don’t feel like they can address the deeper issues. So a check in a stand up is what we call it. We say, hey, here’s what I’m working on, right? And here’s the blockers that I have. I think that kind of checking in is great, but I’m not as much a fan of show us what you got. I feel there’s a power dynamic there that we have to watch out for.

Frode Hegland: I agree with what you said. We’ve been using the wrong vocabulary. That is what you’re saying is what we intend for Adam and Andrew to come in and say Yeah. Andrew, please.

Andrew Thompson: I was a little bit late on the hand raise, but. Yeah, I think you both are talking about the same thing and just using a different term. Because the way I was understanding Adam and I can totally just skip a week and be like, hey, we have nothing to show. We were polishing the code because it’s gross spaghetti. And you guys would be like, cool. You guys are making progress. But if we do have something, Wednesday is our slot to show it off. If there is something there. Excellent. Is that correct? Okay. Cool.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, that’s also my take. So Alan, with your experience, for you to raise these points is very useful. Because if we use different terminology with different histories behind them, you know, that that does make a difference. It seems we agree on this one. We it’s not a demo day. It’s a Hey, guys, what’s up day? Great. So while we’re still waiting for Dini, there’s something that I want to talk about outside of this. I’m going to take a picture of the screen, but I’m going to wait for Dini. By the way, you guys should be here. We’re seeing most of these guys today.

Speaker6: Wow.

Frode Hegland: It should be here.

Speaker6: Are those the Beatles? Those are.

Frode Hegland: The Beatles. Yes, the Beatles are the Mac.

Speaker6: Yeah, the Beatles.

Frode Hegland: When I landed in SFO on Monday, the immigration queue was very short, which was lovely. And I got to this nice lady and she asked me, why are you here? I said, you use Macintosh or Windows? And then she put her hand to hers. Do they still make Macintosh? So I said, what? What are you talking about? You’re in Silicon Valley. Yes, they make Macintosh, and it’s the birthday on Wednesday. And she was like, oh, I don’t, I stay away from all that tech stuff. I said, you’re in silicon. Okay, where are you from? And she was from Kentucky. So then we started talking about justified. It was the most bizarre immigration story ever. And she asked, so what are you doing here? And I started explaining the work on purpose to make it really slow and drawn out, and she basically told me to bug off. So that was quite funny.

Speaker6: So yeah.

Frode Hegland: The Macintosh story. But okay, so I’ve got an email from my former professor whom I did my master’s under asking if we do anything with Zettelkasten. Of course, we’ve all looked into that at different times. Yeah. And in the lovely dinner yesterday with Brandel, we talked a lot about graphs. So I’d like to just throw a little bit into the community. I’m not saying we should spend the whole thing, but just a few minutes just to see how you guys feel. First of all, my assumption is that a graph needs space. Therefore, XR is perfect for graphs. There are of course many implementation issues, so if we do anything graph wise, we’re going to have to test, test throw away, test throw away for a very long time. But the real question for you guys is.

Speaker6: In.

Frode Hegland: Helping us think and not confusing us. Should we be allowed? To easily have a document and a thought in the same space. Is that too much? Should we have a library and zettelkasten together? Or should they be separate and brought together only through special means?

Alan Laidlaw: I think that this is a great conversation for, like, interface fantasies. You know, like there’s a lot that I’m there’s a thing that I want to see in VR that is probably the only reason I would put on a helmet, but I don’t want to over I want don’t want to overlap that. Hey, Deanie. With any kind of work that’s going on here. Right. So, like, if we’re until we have a good handle of what’s defined in the project, I think talk of Graphs and all these things which which may actually be better use cases. Needs to be put behind a, a barrier to, to understand like that. This may be where we want to go, but this isn’t in the project. I’m just saying that part I, I do. Think that there’s a lot of opportunity in a kind of a graph approach. But But I.

Alan Laidlaw: I want to make sure that we have proper barriers for that kind of conversation.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, Andrew. You’re next. But just Danny, just to update you. We just discussed the whole idea of Wednesdays beginning. Adam and Andrew update us on what’s going on. Sometimes showing something. Just saying there isn’t anything to show. We’re all completely happy with that, obviously. And then the only thing that I just threw in while waiting for you was. Are we also looking at graph things? There’s more to it, but I’d love to hear what Andrew says. And then whenever you want to comment, obviously the first.

Andrew Thompson: Oh, well, I don’t want to take it in a different route. And if you’re trying to organize the conversation. But since we brought up graphs just really quickly want to describe from a developer side first of all, like, I love the idea of visually, I think seeing graphs in VR personally is a lot more interesting than a PDF. It sounds fascinating. But I think reading. Info of a graph. Say that’s currently on a PDF. Usually they’re images, and we would be getting unreliable data back from that. Trying to read that with the PDF tools we have. So I would say that if we want graphs, it would probably be something that’s handled by the visual meta. So you could insert a graph using say, author or something like that. And it doesn’t show up in your document unless you’re in the VR software. We’re thinking the same way. All the information we need. Okay, perfect.

Speaker6: That’s great.

Alan Laidlaw: I can I can add to that later, but Go ahead.

Frode Hegland: Dini poetry under.

Dene Grigar: So as we talked about last week, we’re going to have on Wednesdays an agenda. And the agenda will be ready for you on Monday. And that agenda starts with the presentation by an Adam and Andrew about what they may have done or may not have done, or what they’re trying to do, and they’re just going to report in, we call it reporting in whatever status they’ve got, they’re going to report in to us. In the next part we talked about last week and agreed to, I thought because I made a like a practice agenda for us is that then we open up the discussion for next steps. We give feedback, next steps and those kinds of things. And that was going to be the process for Wednesday. Alan, you and I talked about the need for Wednesday meeting and my my response to that was, it’s not necessary for everybody to come on Wednesday, but anybody that’s interested in the broader than the Sloan Project. And one thing that I’d like to say is that I spent last weekend drawing a diagram of how the future of text has been moving forward for the past decade and how this project fits. And this is something that I can finalize together and conceptualize in a way that we share with everybody so that it’s clear, like what parts of the Monday meeting, you know, how does Monday, you know, work with the Wednesday Friday stuff? And Friday is primarily for Deb, right.

Dene Grigar: So Wednesday is just to get feedback, give direction. Dev meets on Friday. They work until the next Monday. Next Wednesday they make a presentation and that just that kind of workflow. And now you’ve been a project manager for a long time. So you know that that workflow is important. And you just got to get into that, that kind of discipline. We’re not starting it until after Fiona gets here because photo and I need to lay out. The foundational material as pies. Right? And then we could start to lay out the roles of everybody. And one more thing I’ll say. And I’ve said this a thousand times, but I want to bear it bears repeating. What we’re talking about now should have happened after the onboarding. Right. Normally you on board and then you start the project. Sure, we did it. I would say ask backwards. Not our own fault though. We did it because the grant hit in a really bizarre way. And Frodo just got his contract yesterday.

Speaker6: Finalized.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, I still have to sign it, which I obviously will do today. Yeah. No, Danny, of course that is completely correct. And I don’t mean to just dive into things. This is, I think, a bit similar to what you did on Monday by people talking about about who they are. I was thinking this is a topic to find out who we are for the topic, for the project. I mean, and the reason I brought up the whole graph thing is very similar to what Andrew was talking about. Reading a PDF in VR will be interesting. I’m sure we can do some things, but why you would put on a thinking cap is probably to use the unique aspect, which is the very, very large canvas. And a lot of people are trying different types of things around this. But I do think that reading in VR or spatial computing or whatever is not just and I know I’m preaching to the choir. It’s not just looking at a PDF, it’s also reading. In space. So that means reading a huge library with connections. Also reading your own thoughts. So I wanted to get a feeling for where you guys are leading, what you want to most play with. Because let’s be honest, this is also play. More about a document or a lot or a huge space.

Alan Laidlaw: Can we put a candle? Whatever the expression was, keep a candle on for that. I mean, I think that’s definitely a worthwhile, broader topic to have. We’ve got a lot of thoughts and and they want to they are the kinds of thoughts that should also be committed to text. But so I’d like to put that there because that’s conceptual. And I want to talk a little bit more about the Wednesday and the Friday thing, or just the actual.

Speaker6: Alan, that’s who we.

Alan Laidlaw: Who we want to be in a year’s time. Like what? What do we want to have done? That we’ll feel good about? What will be. What will we feel bad about and keep us grounded in, like, the developers time that’s available. And actually talk with developer expectations. I mean, there’s I have been a project manager and project manager for a long time, and part of that is to get a real good understanding of the realities of any particular project and then change the rules to those realities.

Speaker6: And so.

Frode Hegland: That is what Jenny and I will be working on next week. Right. So today the discussion is much looser. It is getting. I really want to get a feel for what you guys want this to be, because Danny and I are going to be drawing the boxes around it next week. That is our responsibility to do, and we don’t want to do that as two dictators. That would be silly. So it’s really good for us to get a good feeling for what you want this to be. If, for instance, today you said no graphs, you’re like, okay, we’ll stay away from that. No, not right. I’m just saying to hear it. Maybe if you guys just talk one by one and just say what you want this project to be, that would be very useful. What do you think?

Alan Laidlaw: I’ll. I’ll try and answer that and then maybe even start the roundabout if you want. There’s the thing that I want to see. That I want to have my feelings about that disabused by research. And then there’s a different thing, which is what the project is and what’s in the proposal. So the so I personally think that a very limited minimal. Graph approach is on the right track. From a deeper perspective, what I want is a place where I can continually grow my information, and I don’t want to go for a one off little blast. I want to be able to treat it like a garden. So I actually don’t want things to change very much. I just want to be able to go like, hey, I’m going to add to that a little bit, right?

Speaker6: But. That. Is.

Alan Laidlaw: Not in the proposal. So it’s not that it can’t happen, but it’s the kind of thing that like the, the, the the gears and the wires should be approached, I would imagine first and, and and then maybe bring in some of these things.

Speaker6: I forgot. Yeah.

Frode Hegland: It’s not outside of the proposal. This is what Danny and I. Based on the conversation we’re having with you guys today, we’ll have to really decide, because the notion of reading and writing are very broad, right? We are working on. And we will make it possible to have a pleasant interaction with the PDF. That’s fine. That will happen. We may even have that nicely augmented. That is fine. That will happen. And of course we will have to do research to find out what in the world is actually useful with these PDFs. That will happen when it comes to the more graph like things, I think it is very close to the conversation because remember, there’s three aspects to this, right? One is the metadata. One is the dialog and one is the software. So if we do manage to conceptually provide this garden system you’re talking about. It’s not out of scope. The question is whether we can afford, time wise to do it first or second year, or whether, you know, we look at it slightly differently. Adam, you haven’t spoken yet. Magic. What do you want?

Speaker6: Well, the most basic thing.

Adam Wern: Is that I want to get my hands into computing the the real hands. So in a way I’m a bit less impressed by the immersiveness. It’s cool and it’s interesting and the space is awesome to have lots of space. But if I want to trust my instincts here, I want more of my senses and my other kinds of embodiment. I’m I’m already a very visual thinker, but I’m I think we are underserved when it comes to the hands and maybe spatial audio. I don’t know how relevant it is, but I want to. When I asked my I told the team or the lab this before, but when I asked my kids or when they ask me if they can see something, they always grab it with their hands. It’s never just see. It’s taking it, looking at it, grabbing it, feeling it, or playing with it, looking at different angles. And that’s the way I read as well. And I’m also a compulsive text selector person. I select text when I read a digital text just to have kind of a fiddle some sort of marker. I want to do that. I want to I want text to become a material that is more personal playful, living a living text, a living material. So if I want something out of this project, it’s probably that I see great opportunities for XR, but I also see great the endless dangers of going down things that are not. Fundamentally meaningful. So we should have a kind of really trust our inner meaningful detector or meaning detector and all this. I think I use that as a guide light, and it serves well, I think, and especially when there are endless opportunities for spectacle in XR because it encompasses everything.

Adam Wern: And in terms of kind of considerations for the project, we we have some major decisions to make when it comes to VR, AR. And there are quite complicated as a, for example, the Apple Vision Pro in the WebEx environment right now and in the foreseeable future it will be VR only as we know it right now. We don’t know. So it’s VR, but I’m. When I try it myself. I love the thing. To see my room, to see the things around me, and to play with my walls and autodetected surfaces that become living. And that’s wonderful. But we have to. That’s a really tough nut to crack here. And because we have different capabilities of the systems and, and in a way totally different directions. And the third thing is that. A real limitation of the current headset is the optical distance that it’s further away than I would like it to. It’s not in your hand. The focus will be bad in your hand and it will be a bit dizzy, which means that we might need to master some sort of remote interaction, which is also very super interesting. To do, but in a way it’s harder because it’s uncharted. We know much about our close interaction, but we don’t know as much about kind of remote interaction because we don’t have that. We don’t have the physical reality, maybe fishing and some tools we could pull in like, okay, sorry. Yep.

Speaker6: On the distance thing.

Frode Hegland: I think we have to. And not read too much about it. Obviously you have real experience, Adam. So but what I mean is, just before I got on the flight, yes, I did bring the quest. I could actually read relatively close. It wasn’t as nice. Right. So I think we have to really look at what do we mean by reading, what do we mean by all these different things? Because if you want to really crisp and clear, yes, you do need it in a let’s for the sake of this discussion, call it a frame. You put it in your optimal reading frame area or thing. But there are a lot of things like controls, like the Fabian style controls on your arm to read those things. It’s absolutely not a problem. So the experimentation of when you guys get something up in the headset for us to, you know, fiddle with optimal all kinds of things will be phenomenally interesting. And yes, they Dana, you have your hand up, but I’ll talk until you come back.

Adam Wern: The tricky thing there is that from my experience so far, and it could be that I’m easily get seasick or motion sick or and VR sick. Is that. It creeps on you with VR. Suddenly you feel dizzy and you don’t know. You can’t really pinpoint to where where you got some effects really make you dizzy and or we are sick immediately. But some other things, like having a kind of no focus on your wrist or interactions close where you really need to strain your eyes for a bit, could suddenly pull you over that threshold where you feel that I need to take the headset off and yeah. So that’s a thing to consider, I think. And I don’t think I’m unique in that. I think that’s the majority of the people who are not who don’t have a really good do you call it sea legs?

Frode Hegland: Yes. Well, on this point, Adam, please understand I agree with you. Right? And one sorry stereoscopic video. I’ve only seen one good one. And in in the quest. And that was somebody at CES this year. He used the canon double lens system. And he was there with a person most of the time, was actually really good. But when that person came a little too close, something happens. And I discussed this with Brandel yesterday and he said, if there is even anything wrong with the synchronization we get, it’s horrible. So you’re absolutely right, Adam. I’m just saying that for optimal reading. Yes, but, you know, we shouldn’t be afraid of moving things about. And if it’s a bit close, it shouldn’t be long. But this should be one of our research topics. So. Yeah, it’s just perfect. Danny, you had your hand up. Sorry.

Dene Grigar: That’s okay. So I’m looking at a book called How We Think by Catherine Hales, very important book that came out kind of the mid 2000. But in this book she argues that there’s three she takes on a lot of the folks that the critics of reading. Okay. Well, that’s. Yeah, she, she’s she I can’t say she’s a dewy thinker, but she has cited Dewey a lot. Nice. She talks about three types of reading, and she takes on Nicholas Carr and a lot of people that are critical of reading on a computer or reading with a computer or computing device. There’s close reading, hyper reading and machine reading. And what she says is that all of them are important. All of them are necessary. We just need to understand what the different practices are and the processes for and then what they net like what is it? What do you net when you do a a close reading? When do you use it? Why do you use it? What do you get out of it? And the same goes for hyper reading and machine reading. Right. And so it, it turned the it turned the conversation from reading on a computer is bad for you because you’re not going to remember anything. To wait a minute, there’s ways to engage with reading, right in a computer environment, and you can do close reading. So it’s a really important book. And I want to say that if that’s the first point I want to make, the second thing I want to respond to Adam, I mean, to Alan. The way we always do projects in, in our lab is that we prioritize.

Dene Grigar: If we promise something in a timeline, we take that as our kind of skeleton, right? The bones. And then we say, okay, what? What and not not, not we don’t prioritize processes. We prioritize outputs okay. So we have to deliver X by this date. So we’ll get that done. But what you know what else do we want to see in that. What the bare bones as we bring up. A PDF in a headset. Share it. Share library. That’s the that’s stage one, right? That’s the whole year one. That’s the skeleton inside of that. As you pointed out. There’s other things we want to do, you know. So the question we want to ask is what do scholars what do academics want to do in environment like that. And there’s you know, it’s in graphs are part of that. Graphs are visualizations. All of those are part of that. So is it the first thing we do know? You know it probably not. We want to do the most important easy thing low hanging fruit first medium and then stretch goals. We’ll have stretch goals right. And so that might be a stretch goal. But I can tell you that if we go to. The ACM Hypertext Conference in Potsdam next fall. And we say, look, we can put a PDF in a headset, you know, but really go. Yeah. Well that’s not very cool. But we have to do we have to do that. But then do something with that. And the conversation I’ve had with Mark Anderson is what does it mean to read. Right. And that’s those back to Kate Hills.

Speaker6: Yeah, I would.

Alan Laidlaw: I’d love to see reading with your Hands. I’m similar to Adam in that I highlight literally almost every sentence in a in a book. And because of the Kindle caps on on highlights, I wind up actually taking screenshots of the book, which is such a ridiculous workaround, but for another time. The the so that’s I agree, you know, the skeleton getting started with that. I, I hope that there’s a good process of how one comes up with decisions and priorities and that that’s a communal, open, transparent thing. Because this project, it seems to me, and even just from the little we talked about, is so different than let’s make a web app for academics. It is so much more.

Speaker6: It’s.

Alan Laidlaw: Like going on a voyage and choppy seas for the first time, right? Like there’s so much about the device and the and the technical components that really define the overall experience. The article that I posted sent today in slack. I really wish it could have been a book, because it starts out with so many great points about the experience and shortcomings of of the Apple Pro, you know, from a first take. So the I bring that up because while we’re having a discussion about what is useful for academics and imagining ourselves on stage. But it’s also I think. If I were product manager and this were a normal product, or what I would do first. First week of the job is competitive analysis. What other apps are out there that are like this? What are their services? Who? Who are the customers going to be looking at, you know when they consider this product? And in this case, I feel like we need a competitive analysis for experiences. To be able to say, okay, the points that just came up were excellent. Like, I can’t close read or I want to read, but I can’t read that way. And really, if we if we become obsessed with it sounds counterintuitive, but if we become obsessed with those limitations, then we can start to see cracks in those limitations and find new opportunities. And I think we’ll I the the to me, a win is when we have an idea that we’ve never had before, and it’s only come from the amount of research that we’ve done. And and it’s, it’s it’s the sort of way of thinking that means that you’re at the next level of, of your of your product thinking. Right. And it’s, it’s works with like a surfer. It works with the waves that are hitting you, you know. That’s what I hope to get to. Okay. Done.

Dene Grigar: I say one other thing that this project is supposed to do. We haven’t even talked about all the pieces. We’ve just been focused on the VR stuff. Right? That’s not everything. It’s a big part of this. Big part of this project is building the community. Right. And building community means we have we need to set the what are the I call the overarching guidelines, like what are our guidelines for becoming a community? Transparency is one of them. I heard you say, you know, egalitarian ability to, you know, contribute. I mean, we need to lay out the guidelines. And I can tell you that even in my academic program at the university, we have 12 guidelines that the faculty put together. And every fall retreat, we review them and we recommit to them by vote. If we need to change them, we do it. So for the last, I don’t know, 12 years we’ve had these guidelines that we all agreed to and built and, you know, adhere to as friends and as community. That’s the kind of stuff I’d like to see us do next week. Right. So, you know, building the community. And we also promised that we’d become more diverse. And right now, we don’t have any new members. Right. Except Andrew, you know. And so we need to start thinking about the diversity issue. That’s what Frodo and I are going to talk about next week. You know, how do we get started? And we’re going to bring all these things to the group of, of this group so that we can brainstorm. Right. So there’s a to do list that he and I have to go through. We have a book. We have a conference. Right. We have a symposium. There are so many moving parts to this and I. And Monday is kind of a free for all discussion. Wednesdays are set for the project and the projects, not just the XR. It’s the whole thing. Yes.

Frode Hegland: But my my feeling is a bit that Monday should also kind of include the book and symposium, you know, who we should invite and so on. And we have to start the student competition at some point. But when it comes back to yeah, so I really think Wednesday, this is something for us to hash out the details, of course, in terms of procedure, but it is very much about the what are we building thing. And my goal for when someone puts on a headset and uses any one of our experiences, because hopefully we’ll have more than one. And that’s why it’s so important for the mechanism of how the user can choose which one to view is very, very simple. Oh my God, I can imagine working in VR. But for me it is theater. That is the goal. I’m not expecting the first time user to actually get real knowledge work done. I’m expecting them to emotionally get the feel that they can do that. And of course, that is a combination of us making things that are truly useful. Like what? I can do this and this. That. Wow. Helps me think. Plus other things like, wow, that looks really cool. I think that wow, that looks really cool, even if it’s entirely useless, should be part of our dialog. Because this is a sales pitch. You know, I, I don’t have a big ego.

Frode Hegland: And it comes up sometimes in discussions where I feel, oh no, I shouldn’t do this or that or whatever. However, when it comes to our work here, my ego says to me that we are the group who will be one of the most important groups to help Apple sell the Vision Pro and for vision for quest in the future, simply because everyone else is focusing on something else. There may be cleverer than us. There’s certainly cleverer than me. They certainly have more resources than us, but they’re focusing on entertainment and social. I have word for quest. I’m sure some of you have it too. It’s a freaking web page. So if we do our job right in the Monday, getting the right people into the community for the articles and the wider thinking, if we manage to put together a few experience that some of them’s like, you do this and that, and then you get this, oh, that’s useful, because I had a brief chat with Adam last week, and one of the things we talked about, let’s say if we do graphs but nonfunctional. So when you put on the headset you have this amazing graph thing happening. It’s just covering everything. It’s beautiful. And all you can do is read one PDF that may or may not be useful to help the person understand. Damn, this is a different space, Alan.

Alan Laidlaw: Yeah. Okay. A couple of things that are useful there. And this is exactly the kind of clarity that I’m looking for. You said this is a sales pitch, right? So that is That’s the thing that’s good to know up front, right? So like.

Speaker6: Just on.

Frode Hegland: My sales page, just on that it’s a sales pitch for two things. One, the person putting on the headset thinking, wow, with better stuff, I can think here. And two Sloan and other organizations saying they’re doing really exciting stuff. We have to help them make it more useful.

Alan Laidlaw: Right. Okay. Yeah. So sales pitch versus so if you’re imagining yourself on the stage and you know, I gave you two options. Of what you could be. And one is Doug Engelbart saying, here’s a demo of everything. And the other is, here’s what we did for seven months. And here are some interesting things that we found. And here’s also some danger zones. And what we found is, you know, like counterfactuals and things to avoid. You know, and and there you are. These are our findings, right? Which would you rather. And then I’ve got a little bit more on that.

Frode Hegland: But you can hear us, right? Hopetoun is not too far away. I want both in the projects and the way that I propose to do both is that I would love to be the dog dealing lightning with both hands. No question for this. I’m all theatrical. I want to put this on someone’s head and be all big words and all of that stuff, right? But I don’t think that in any way interferes with the other role of noting down as we go along the research, the counterfactuals, what we found, the opportunities, the issues. I think we have to do both. But in terms of the software development, I look forward to arguments and fights over priorities for these two sides. Hey, we should try this flashy stuff. No, we should try this useful stuff to find out. Okay, well, let’s do this this week and that next week. Adam, under. What do you think those kinds of discussions I think will be wonderful.

Dene Grigar: If we take what Kate Hill says as kind of a model for what academics do close reading, machine reading and hyper reading. If we talk about that, let me lower my hand. Close reading is being able to get inside the text and do a textual analysis. You’re looking at, you know, something like word for word, linguistic, you know, all those kinds of things that that we do to make meaning out of a text. Right? Hyper reading is scanning. And anybody who’s been in graduate school, you know that if you’re doing four books a week for a class, you have to scan. And so to be able to scan in a VR space and just find what you need quickly and get out right in and out. And then third is machine reading. And this is a really interesting one because now when she wrote this, I wasn’t very Robust. Now machine reading inside a VR environment can be very powerful. So machine reading is when the computer reads with you, right? And you’re able to access information through the computer reading your text. So textual analysis through the use of word searches and things like that, that’s very powerful. So if we take this as a model. And begin to kind of break that down into case studies. Alan, this could be a useful starting point. This text is very well received when it came out. And there’s she’s got a lot of folks that we can look at that she cites. And then she’s done some more recent work in cognition. So the book that came out about a year right after the pandemic is another book book we might want to look at.

Speaker6: So yeah, please.

Alan Laidlaw: Yeah. If you have a PDF of them send them along. Otherwise I’ll look I will look into how we think by Catherine

Dene Grigar: Our slack channel. I dropped it in there.

Alan Laidlaw: Okay, thanks.

Frode Hegland: Hang on, just just between you guys, kind of, so to speak. First of all, Danny, I ordered the book. It will be delivered to your place so I can even read it while I’m in Washington with you. Alan. Adam. Andrew, you agree this this sounds like a reasonable model to follow, right?

Speaker6: Which won the close reading. The no reading or.

Frode Hegland: The different modes as and we discussed are we you know like are we talking about close reading. Now that basically means holding a PDF, you know, roughly speaking. And now we’re talking about machine reading and we’re talking about, you know, we should probably read up on this. And yeah.

Alan Laidlaw: I don’t I don’t think we need to decide on whether it’s the, the paradigm right now is definitely intriguing. I got nothing against it.

Frode Hegland: Alan, if you send me a shipping address, I’ll send you a copy of the book. I’ll do it on the Amazon.

Dene Grigar: I appreciate I think we want to Alan, just to respond to that, I think we want to underpin anything we do in an academic discussion that’s taking place. Right. So even if we don’t use Kate’s model, find a model that’s already been circulating that people accept academics believe in. I mean, we believe that those of us in the humanities, she’s our she’s our goddess. I mean, I have ever written she’s considered the genius in the field of media studies, digital humanities and cognition. So she I love it.

Alan Laidlaw: I can’t wait to read her stuff that sounds like right in line with what I’ve been looking for. Probably like finding trying to find words for.

Dene Grigar: You did her master’s degree in biology, so she started her career as a scientist, right? And then she made the shift into humanities. And so she’s a big name in the science and literature group salsa, salsa. And and she writes a lot about cognition. And when she looks at things, she looks at everything through a lens, like as if she’s got a microscope. And her analysis is not a humanities type. Traditional humanities analysis. It’s always grounded in scientific process. Right? So she she bridges the bridges, the gap between science and literature in a way that people like Bronowski did. You know, the folks that come from the sciences that talk about, you know, like snow, you know, C.P. snow talking about the humanities and the sciences. She talks about the sciences from the humanities, but she has the grounding in both, unlike them, who have no grounding in humanities at all.

Speaker6: That’s great.

Dene Grigar: Yeah. I’ll pull up the other one to the cognition one for you.

Speaker6: Yeah.

Alan Laidlaw: This is a yet another side quest in our commerce conversation. But it it goes to perhaps when you have you talk about onboarding. One of the things that I’m. Pride myself in is avoiding toxic situations with a group.

Speaker6: And sometimes it works.

Alan Laidlaw: And sometimes it doesn’t. But one of the things that I try to.

Speaker6: Well.

Alan Laidlaw: In an arena format like we’re having right now. I think it could be very easy to, as we’ve seen, jump into various topics. You know, this is where an agenda can help, but it’s also it’s just a reality of it. And so I. It’s also very compelling to feel like we’ve all decided on something and agreed to something, because no one has the words yet to come up with the counterpoint. So I like to. Bring forward maybe a a buffer. So that we can get the information out and understand that this is a thing to decide on, you know, and and then and I don’t just mean this case in particular. It sounds great. But I mean, actually more important to the, to the later technical decisions when we’re all excited and it seems like, yeah, let’s do it this way. Building in some kind of buffer to make sure that we’re not just doing that because other points haven’t been brought up, or if there’s some sort of reversibility to any of these decisions because that kind of decide, commit, move forward, you should have said something back then. It leads to can lead to bad things. I want to just bring that. What do you guys think about that? Might be in two. Protective.

Frode Hegland: I think that this goes back to what we discussed a while ago, which is you editing the websites and you know, we have discussions and we put things in slack. We write documents to each other, we talk. Once it goes on the website is something that should be something we agree on. So if we agree on, for instance, how we think will be the model for reading, we should put that somewhere on the website. Like here are the research findings so far or the decision so far. And of course, if one of us looks at that list that will be growing and finds an issue with it. Of course it’s up for discussion. But you know, it also should there should be some clarity. One thing obviously with projects too, is if they’re too democratic, it can be democratic in the bad way, like nothing ever gets done. Of course, that is not what? Of course that’s not what you’re suggesting. It’s just like when we decide on something, we decided on it. It’s written in stone. But of course, we all have chisels. Does that sound like what you were talking about, Deanie? About writing down kind of the agreements or principles, but. And then you kind of vote on them when necessary.

Dene Grigar: Yeah. We should. I mean, I think, I mean, we things should we, we need to agree on how we’re going to work together. We’ve never had to do this before, ever. And I’m not suggesting it should be how Mondays work. Mondays should always be what photo had always done. But the Wednesday, Friday stuff, the stuff of the of the project, we should have as a team of developers and thinkers and UX UI people. We should agree on what we believe in in terms of working together as a team. And so those those principles should. Be agreed upon by all of us. I mean, I don’t sit down and make the principles for my department and go, oh, here we go. Everybody adhere to this. But it has to start somewhere. I’ll make a list of things like, okay, here’s some things that we’ve been doing that seem to work.

Speaker6: Yeah. Now. One second. What else?

Dene Grigar: What am I missing? What else do we want to put here as as a as a guide, as a, you know, guiding principle, I call them. And then we come up with the final, like, not a final list, but a working list. And then we revisit it. We might run into some issues like, well, that one’s not working. What do we need to do? So that’s why every year we recommit or or reedit the principles.

Alan Laidlaw: Yeah, I’m talking more about the practicalities of the day to day and the approach. You know, there’s a style that’s sort of waterfall and there’s a style that’s sort of bullying where it says like, okay, here’s what we’re going to do next. And, and that style leads to a lot of blind spots. The alternative is, you know having the decisions come from the bottom up rather than the top down, essentially. Right. Like, that’s kind of what I’m getting at is not saying that that’s what’s happening or anything, but just when we have a distributed team and an unknown project like this with emerging technology, it seems pretty critical to have a bottom up structure.

Speaker6: Right?

Dene Grigar: This is this is an unknown project. I mean, we we would not have gotten $250,000 for an unknown project. I want to go on record saying that.

Speaker6: Okay. So that’s, that’s.

Alan Laidlaw: That’s a semantic ambiguity. And yeah.

Speaker6: We I.

Dene Grigar: Do want to say there is a there’s not just a, there’s not just an either or. And Rob, you know, about the men day in ancient Greek. The both and right. There’s there’s other ways of thinking about this. It’s not a binary top down bottom up. This can’t be top down. This can’t be bottom up. It needs to be managed and led by Frodo and me because we’re responsible for it. But it doesn’t mean that we have to be authoritative and say, this is, you know, do this. Do this because you’re volunteering with the hell I mean, come on. And the point of the project, Alan, is to bring in as many people as possible so that we would avoid blind spots when Bob horn is not here. So I’m not I’m not trying to be ugly. But when he said that, you know, 50 CEOs got together to talk about climate change, I just my skin crawled. But no, no, no, that’s not how we’re going to fix climate change. I don’t want Exxon involved in climate change. You know, I want, you know, mom down the street, you know, struggling with her electricity bill who can’t breathe because of air is polluted in the Pacific Northwest with fire, wildfire. I want people like that also weighing in.

Speaker6: So where.

Dene Grigar: So we want to bring in people that’s going to help us with these blind spots. At the same time, we want to have a little bit of, you know, a little bit of organizational structure. And that comes from Froda and me. So it’s a middle ground, right? It’s kind of something different than this or this and it’s not quite wonderful. It’s not quite a waterfall either because I’ve done that, you know, process.

Frode Hegland: The organizational structure will clearly primarily come from Deeney because she knows what she’s talking about. And it’s her name on the contract. Even though I started this stuff, I am just a partner because I’m not an American person and all of that stuff. However, if this doesn’t work, I don’t have much of an academic future. So, you know, to me it’s extremely important and that is why I will defer to Deeney on a whole host of stuff. I see my role as being direction and gathering. I believe very strongly that Mondays should continue like they were, but with the full knowledge that we’re now working at a higher level. So the discussions there, if they want to touch upon something that’s being done on Wednesdays, to a degree, I think that’s okay. But I think we should invite more people in which we need to start doing very soon. My concern initially, which caused some friction, has been we need to get the damn stuff in the headset. And the reason I’m bringing up the discussion, the side discussion today, which is a bit central about graphs, is. What do we want to get to that set? You know, Mark Anderson has worked very hard to give us these amazing Jason’s. You know, what are the kind of things? Because. Metadata is what makes data useful. Again, preaching to the choir. But if we don’t really have a plan for how to deal with that stuff, everything.

Frode Hegland: And again, this is all for clarity. I’m not telling you anything new. Everything we build in the headset will be a dumb demo. You know, if it’s going to relate to other things, it has to know what things are. And that’s why, you know, sitting back a little bit and thinking, what the hell is special about a headset? There are many things, but two things spring to mind immediately. One is space and one is lack of space. The ability to be in outside of your environment. To just have a book in a fireplace in front of you is really cool and useful. And so is, you know, using the whole space like we talked about. We need to really every once in a while have an espresso, sit back and just think about these things. Right. Because what I’m concerned about is and it’s funny mirroring Mark Anderson at the moment, we really shouldn’t try too hard to just get traditional stuff into the headsets. It’s just not compelling. You know, even me future of text and blah blah blah. I prefer to read a paper book, you know? No question. So that’s why it’s really good today to have this discussion of what the heck do you guys want? You know? And I’d like to hear more from you, Alan, on this. So good timing with your yellow hand.

Speaker6: Yeah, I would say if.

Alan Laidlaw: If and I’m framing this very much as this is not what I consider the project to be. If a half a year ago I was right, you know, involved more and working on the proposal, what I would what I would want to see would would be testing the hypothesis that VR is actually a place for search. And the search is the experience at the end of a query is a constellation of Wikipedia like essentially making a tool for Wikipedia where, where you’re not reading the articles, but you are getting the nodes and connections. And so you would enter in a search could be in the form of you’re out and about and you hear a great story about Newton and the counterfeiter. And so you write that into like an email and you shoot an email to your VR garden space. And by the time you log in, it’s there, ready for you. And not only do you have the obvious connection of Newton and the time frame and that year, but the other people that are involved and you just have this stellar cartography of that particular query. The query could also be defined as a PDF that you have brought into your, your focus, attention, space. But then everything else behind it is what does it connect to. And then it’s just as easy to. Pick out the paths without doing actually close reading, but pick out the paths and shoot that off to another medium. That could be a 2D screen where you could do other kinds of research. I would love to see something like that. Or and that’s just the bone. That’s the skeleton version. I think there’s a lot of other interesting angles to explore there. But yeah.

Frode Hegland: So, Alan, the only real word I disagree with there is the use of the word search. Because I think what you described there is very close to what we are actually doing. We’re not doing search, but we are definitely helping people see connections and see relationships and how to find things. I guess that’s similar to search. So I think elements of that is definitely relevant. The way that I see our software projects is split in two. One of them is reading a document either as a single frame, more pages expanded or not, or 1 or 2 documents. I see that as being one project in and of itself. I see seeing a library as being a different project. Of course, that’s just conceptually to the user should be the same thing, right? So what I’m trying to learn from you guys today is the notion of what are the things that should be floating when the library is in a graph view, the library should of course be in a list view as well. Just, you know, something simple. Why not? Should also be like Rob’s bookshelf behind us? Probably why not? But if we really get excited about using the massive space as some kind of a graph slash map. This is where we have to start putting frames around what we’re doing. Is it what will be in this? And this is what I’ve been thinking about a lot over the few days, so please give me a few minutes on this.

Frode Hegland: So. We could imagine a view that is only the authors write. Just a bunch of author names. That’s it. Because authors are a first class category, we could imagine the titles and titles with author. We can imagine these things organized on a timeline on a side ability line, like Adam has done some of these things already. This gets very, very interesting. But what keeps coming into my head, and this is Danny. I think you had to leave because of the reconnection. Earlier, my professor Harold Thimbleby asked about, are we looking at Zettelkasten? No we’re not. However, the notion of thinking on cards is so. Core. And you know, on Friday I’ll be spending three hours with a guy who invented HyperCard. That is amazing. I will be videoing at least the proper bit of that. If we’re going to let such a system include our own thoughts. It does expand the scope. Of course it does. But does it expand the scope in a bad way? That’ll make it messy, either technically or usability wise? Or does it make it more natural? Because it most certainly is part of reading and writing. Being, first of all to you, the way that I phrased that, how does that make you feel?

Dene Grigar: Well, I think it’s fine. I mean. I don’t know what’s what’s controversial about it.

Speaker6: Oh, no, what’s.

Frode Hegland: What’s controversial is that I think today’s a great day for us all to stretch a bit. And Ireland clearly said this is if it was a different project and, you know, thought about it a long time ago. And I feel that a real element of it is relevant. I feel that. When someone puts the okay, so my brother is a theater director and an actor. You know, so he helps me sometimes think in terms of theater, like Adam. You know exactly what I’m talking about. So the emotions here, what what are the emotions? The emotion of someone putting on this headset is their brain is opened. It feels, you know, like when you put on a helmet, usually it feels crushed in. This should make your brain feel open. Just like when you go from working on a phone to working on a big screen, you can breathe a little more. So we should let people put this on. It’s like, oh my God, you know, this is this is where I’m at. And that has a million questions on, you know, AR, VR and blah, blah, blah.

Dene Grigar: I do want to respond to Allan that your points are well taken. The thing I will say about the the development of this grant. Is that there are two types of Sloan grants that we could write a research grant and a production grant. Right. And when Froda started this process, it was long before I was a twinkle in his eye. He began this process with vent and others right writing this grant and he had already developed some ideas for it, and he pitched it to Sloan for $350,000 for three years. And Sloan liked the idea and said, this is not a research grant, or you’re not answering a research question. You are getting in there and mucking around with production and solving problems that academics are going to be having. As we move forward with the use of XR and you’re going to be working through these elements so that we can you can you can define those. And not a company like Apple. Right. The processes, not the tech. And so they came back and said, but we’re not going to give you $350,000 in three years. We’re going to give you two years and 250, and you have to have an American sponsor, because we’re an American organization. So then Frodo reached out to me, and I said I’d be happy to talk to my university about this, and it took a while for us to get this work through the university. I’m just telling you the process. You understand? Yeah.

Speaker6: This is great. No. Thank you.

Dene Grigar: Yeah, I actually thought, because I don’t I didn’t come to a lot of your meetings, so I was under the impression that all of you were, were part of the conversation long before I walked in on all this stuff, but it seems like maybe not. So I’m just telling you the history, a little bit of the history of this, because I think the context makes a lot of sense. So it’s not a research grant. If it were, I would start with a research question. Everything I do starts with a research question. Right. But this isn’t that. This is get in there and muck around. We want to see what you can turn out with reading. And you say you’re going to be doing this. This is the minimum. I mean, yeah, what’s nice about Frodo is Draft is that he made very few promises that we couldn’t keep.

Speaker6: Right.

Dene Grigar: And we also had to leave it amorphous because we didn’t know they weren’t they they didn’t expect us to know what we were going to develop. We’re supposed to kind of figure this out as we go. We’re allowed to muck around and fuck up. Right. And as long as we.

Frode Hegland: Fucked up and not down.

Dene Grigar: But so that’s what we’re that’s what this whole thing was about. So it was about, you know, and then also, they’re giving us money for the symposium. We’ve never had anyone giving funding. Folks have been doing this out of pocket and from people donating. Right. Vint Cerf being one of them. So now we have money. And on Friday of next week, we’re going on site visits to beautiful locations on the waterfront that we can find a decent place for all of us to, to, to meet. And it funds the book and somebody to help him edit the book. So there’s just so much involved in this grant, so many moving parts. The, you know, the the actual XR part is one of three things, but it’s going to go ahead.

Alan Laidlaw: Sorry, I’m.

Dene Grigar: Gonna drive the way the book unfolds and it’s going to underpin the conference proceedings. Right. The way we do this. So I’m just saying this because you’re not off key by saying we should have a research question, but we didn’t and we we didn’t. They didn’t want us to have one. Because they want to focus on like, right. Just one thing. They want you to they want us to get out and play.

Alan Laidlaw: I One thing I love about this group is how aspirational all the every Monday it’s going to be an aspirational talk, some nuggets going to come out of it. It’s always rewarding that way. Right. And and that’s also why it’s a kind of a blur. Every Monday you get done with a meeting, you’re like, whoa, what? We talked about like 12 wild things. Where am I now? Right. And so it’s great. And what you just said re anchoring, I think is really important because I think it’s I totally agree that the most important thing out of this project may not be the product itself, the thing that you can do, because we may hit up with so many limitations that our dreams aren’t really realized. And we should be okay with that, right? Because it’s like it’s this process of exploration. It’s not dealing with a mature iPhone. It’s not dealing with you know, a unity engine. But there are things that Freud’s already built with the community that is already an engine that’s running. And so even exploring that and how we can improve that, that’s its own natural fruition of a project. So it doesn’t take the focus off of what is being built. But.

Alan Laidlaw: What I like is the idea of fuck around and find out as an approach, right? Like, let’s dig in, let’s see what it can do. Let’s see its natural affordances. And if we can’t reach our dreams, if, you know, as Andrew just mentioned, there are and truly there are complications to presenting not just graphs in a VR space, but opening it up to the user to say, like putting in different kinds of information, it can easily become a garbage zone. But in now, four dimensions, right?

Speaker6: But so.

Alan Laidlaw: Reframing off of the tunnel vision that we can get on like I want a dream future interface, but reframing it as like, I realize I may not get that until five years from now. Here’s all this other beneficial stuff that’s going on. The most valuable may be, in fact, a platform that is not meta or Apple, a community platform where these things can be discussed and have some kind of power could wind up being more valuable in the long term than anything we can think of today.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. Absolutely brilliant. On the last bit there. Doug only ever made progress when he made a demo. The big demo was just the big demo. Everything. When you went to talk to the people for sponsorship, he had filmed on physical film, his screen, and he played it back in full screen. And then he went full speed and went back and he slowed and stopped and said, this is what we’re doing, is what we’re doing. So yeah, we got to show him. We got to show him, we got to show him. There’s no question about it. So here’s a question for you guys. Let’s pretend no, no, let’s not pretend. Right now we are at least some of us to some extent, considering having a thinking space that includes not just books, but also our thoughts, quotes, and all kinds of things. Just for the sake of the argument. Just for now. Now I’m meeting with Bill Atkinson on Friday. He invented HyperCard. The reason I wanted to meet him is because it has not been written. What inspired him? Except for some acid trip, which is bullshit. That may have helped him, but it certainly wasn’t everything.

Frode Hegland: Did he know Doug and Ted? Did he know anything about hypertext before the launch? Because he changed the name to HyperCard just a few weeks before launch. So it clearly wasn’t based on that. That’s going to be exciting, however, with you guys, how about. I know, just laughing. How about you guys help me come up with some questions based on the notion that maybe not even at this project, but because we have this unique opportunity, what should I ask him? What can HyperCard like? Things be in XR? I’m just as a final. Yeah. I should ask Mark to. Absolutely. Just the final part of that question is. And a provocation. I could imagine using visual metaphor for this in a big way, where every card has visual metaphors, quote unquote, on the back. So whether it’s an academic PDF, whether it’s someone writing a thought, maybe it’s an actual book, but we don’t have the book, we just have the title and stuff because we can contain other entities. So conceptually we’re talking about cards and space. What would you like to ask him? So I’m going to text Mark right now.

Dene Grigar: Yeah I would say my question would be why. You know, there’s a concept of the stack, a stack of cards, and it comes out of the idea from what I heard and what I’ve read, that when we used to do research papers back before computers, we’d use these little note cards with lines in them, and we’d go to the library and sit and make notes on these note cards and number the cards. And then we go back to home to write, and we’d pull those cards up and be able to shuffle them around and write our research papers. Right. Organize them in a way that made sense. So he used that metaphor, the note card, as the stack of cards. So you’re drilling down through the note cards to get your information. And I just would like to verify from him this is what the theorists are saying about him. And I’d like to know if that’s indeed what he had in mind. The second question is he was there showing this in 1987 next to Mark Bernstein, who was showing Hypergate, and next to Michael Joyce, who was showing, and David de Jay, David Bolter and John B Smith, who were showing Storyspace. And there were other things Shneiderman was there with hyper Privatize. I want to know what he thought of the other. Other systems, and how HyperCard fit as a unique system. Among the constellation that was driving the kind of being driven by the late 80s. So two questions from me that I think will be really useful for my own research. And I think Mark would have 1000 more.

Frode Hegland: Benny, could you please put that on an email to me so I don’t mess it up?

Dene Grigar: Yeah, I’ll drop it in slack to Mark, and we could just start dropping things in there so Mark and I can.

Frode Hegland: Yes, a slack would be. Slack would be very good. By the way, I think Mark Bernstein has blocked me on Facebook.

Dene Grigar: Why?

Frode Hegland: Gaza. He. It’s very interesting what’s happening with people outside of Gaza with their opinions. He’s, you know, whenever someone posts something in front of him and posts something about, you know, stop killing children and he’s doing just return the hostages and everything will be fine. And I wrote, well, Benjamin Netanyahu has said explicitly that they will not stop the offensive if the hostages are released. Here it is. I think he just got so upset that someone disagreed that he just so these real world things are impacting what we’re doing, but hopefully some of our work will have some of us communicate in the future.

Dene Grigar: On Mark Anderson will probably have a lot of good things to say. And Mark Bernstein you know, I’ve known him for 30. Three years. Right. And he was the first person to ever publish me when I was a graduate student. So my first academic paper was published by Mark Bernstein. So I feel like I owe him my career. Right. And so I bring him, let me just finish. But he and I fight all the time over issues. And we finally came to some understanding back in 2000, I think it was 15, but literally he and I would just go round and round about electronic literature, organization and things like that and anti-Semitism that he would, you know, see online. And I’d say, God, I didn’t you know, I didn’t I missed that, you know, show me where that is. I didn’t see that. And so anyway, so but at the same time, I adore him, and I couldn’t imagine, you know, where we’d be right now in hypertext without Marc Bernstein and ELO would not exist. Some people, some people take credit for it. They can do all they want. Most of us, most of us think it’s Mark.

Speaker6: I do appreciate.

Frode Hegland: Mark completely and utterly. Now, you said put things in slack. Good idea. Thank you for the reminder. And I’m telling you guys, I just put in slack. Please put questions to Bill here. Please try always to reply in thread. Because if you replied with a new thing, it just gets too messy. So just please click the button reply in thread, not underneath, because then we get a little bit of a hierarchy. Alan, I can see you have things to do there talking about.

Alan Laidlaw: Yeah, and I’m gonna have to go in a little bit for that bit about the Facebook thing.

Speaker6: I’ll. Just a little side note.

Alan Laidlaw: I lost my two best friends. The three of us were all best friends. Did comics together. We did stuff. I got off Facebook a long time ago. They got into it. And now they’re no longer friends. And

Speaker6: I don’t.

Alan Laidlaw: I think that. Something like Facebook should be really considered as poison, and you have to take it in very careful doses. So that’s not a judgment on you or on him. I’m just saying from personal experience man, just I don’t know. Watch out.

Dene Grigar: Well, I live away from my family. I mean, I’m so thousands of miles away, and the only way I connect with them is Facebook. And it’s so there’s a beautiful part of Facebook that I embrace. And when I teach social media in my classes, we teach ethics. You know what? What is appropriate, what you should do. You know, cyberbullying, all those things. We shouldn’t we should be taking into account when we enter into a social media space. This has been a problem since the days of the Mu. The rape and cyberspace, by Dibble, you know, is an important document that we teach in the program. And digital diversity, you know, being online and listservs. I mean, I’ve been attacked, as you know, and told, you know, read the fucking manual and that kind of stuff. So being when you’re standing even in the streets of downtown Vancouver, you might have someone push you, right? I mean, it’s a town hall.

Dene Grigar: So the bad behavior that some of us have in real life, they bring into the digital space, and what we need to do as individuals is to police ourselves in response to that and limit connections with people that are negative and toxic. And I mean, I have a brother in law I adore. That’s a Maga supporter. This is somebody that has been loyal to me since I was six years old. Now, am I going to cut him off in my life? No. Do we talk about Donald Trump? No. No. Do we talk about his views on Black Lives Matter? No. We talk about family matters that are important to us. And so I found a way to negotiate this. And with Marc Bernstein going back to Marc. We have we’ve we’ve come to some understanding. And it took Alan meeting with him on a Sunday for two hours. In talking to him about our our feelings, our views, and getting him to understand, understand where I was coming from. And now since that day, I’ve not had another issue with him and he’s had not had with me. And that’s going back to just the last thing I’ll say is that getting to know one another, like we were trying to do on Monday, it’s going to mean so much to all of us. Agreed. You have these issues that arise. We know that, you know, Dean is having a bad day because they’ve got candidates coming in, and I’ve got candidates for chair all week long, and I can’t breathe.

Dene Grigar: I can’t freaking breathe. And and, you know, Alan’s dog is sick. Alan dog? Alan’s dog can’t even walk down the stairs. I mean, these things we have to know and give grace and compassion to. And I know it sounds girly to say that stuff, and. Okay, that’s that’s true, but I care. I care about every one of you, and I care more and more as I get to know you. Rob and I are friends now. He’s visited me so many times. We’ve been to Rome together. I think I know all of his girlfriend’s names. All 20 of them. He’s he’s so dear to me, you know, and that connection. And Frodo too. But as I get to know you, Alan and Adam and everybody else, I think those kinds of issues that arise about politics, I mean, Frodo and I had a long discussion about Gaza in Israel. I’m Jewish, Catholic, but I’m not pro Israeli government. Right. So, I mean, we had to have that conversation because I don’t agree with everything that people are saying about Israel or Gaza. There’s other ways to see this issue, and I think that’s important to do this. Anyway, I love you all. Smooches. And I’m heading to campus now. And Andrew, when you come to campus.

Andrew Thompson: I don’t have a specific time. Let’s chat in our meeting after this. I’ll talk timing with you, because I.

Dene Grigar: Really need you there today. Badly. So we’ll talk. All right. Hugs, everybody. Rob. Rob, you and Frodo don’t party too much.

Frode Hegland: No comment. Well, we have a big one today.

Dene Grigar: We have a good time tonight. Oh, my God, I’m so happy that you get to do this.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, it’s it’s it’s going to be all day, actually, with different people. Related. Danny, before you go, I just want to say the discussion we just had, it’s not about Facebook. It’s about identity and community, which is, of course, something we need to bolster in our community for the Wednesday groups. We’re not going to invite people in willy nilly. Absolutely not. However, for the Monday group, we need to organically grow our community. So what we just discussed is really, really important that we have a better respect and communication with people, as I think we’ve generally done well. But now we have to take it up a notch.

Dene Grigar: Yeah we do. We need to we need to get closer together and understand each other’s I don’t know constraints and affordances, as we say in the program.

Speaker6: Okay.

Frode Hegland: Sounds good.

Speaker6: Thank you.

Dene Grigar: Everybody, for tolerating me today. I’m stressed out a little bit over candidates by a.

Speaker6: Yeah. This is this is.

Alan Laidlaw: Something I got to go to, but this is more.

Speaker6: It.

Alan Laidlaw: It possibly could be filtered into a question for the person you’re talking to tomorrow. Regardless, it’s been one of the essays in here is for me, a like, I don’t know, a spiritual guide for this project or something. It’s it’s the Santa Fe Institute. I don’t know if you’re familiar with their work. Yeah. And it has a lot to do with complexity science. And I can take a photo of this essay and post it in there. But in this one. The essayist is talking about visual thinking in an art class that that he had. And she taught us the ability to see an inverted relationship, a picture between a picture’s negative and positive spaces. One sense of object one, one sense of the object of perception shifts dramatically as the figure ground relationship flips. And more. To the heart of the esthetic experience is the construction of visual art, based on the dynamics emerging in the tension between these two complementary spaces. This is a thing that’s obvious to artists, but I don’t I don’t think it gets nearly enough focus in, in technology. And it’s about this so you contextualize it. That’s perfect. Yes. Yeah, it’s page 93.

Speaker6: Talks about.

Alan Laidlaw: Applying this to, like, complexity.

Alan Laidlaw: You know, we talk about seeing the big picture, but of course, merely seeing the big picture is insufficient. Seeing the big picture necessitates the loss of information at higher resolution. What goes on at SFI is not simply a withdrawal to the vantage point of providing more encompassing vision. Rather, it’s akin to the development of a new way of directing attention and deploying it towards. And it goes on like that. Where where it’s worth a read, but it’s it’s essentially. The tools that we have today focus our attention in such a tunnel vision way. And then the only other alternative is this big picture approach, which is what graphs are. And. Even though he doesn’t provide any answers here, it’s that it’s that parallax. It’s that switch between figure ground that I think is so rare to find, certainly in technology. And if if we can build a tool that allows for some of that flip, I would be happy.

Frode Hegland: Go ahead Alan, that’s important. Please write the name of the book as well in slack. And also I’ve shown this many times. Some of you read it. It’s relevant to what you talked about there.

Speaker6: I love I have all his books or read all his books.

Frode Hegland: It’s amazing. I think that’s a great question. Adam, please.

Adam Wern: Well, it’s a different topic. If I wonder what what kind of research we would like to do at this point. What do we need to do to it could be technical or conceptual research that would be very good to have early on instead of in two, three. Month or half year. Great question. Because that could be many of the processes need to be be taken in a certain order and maybe revisited when once we know more, but some things could potentially be. Well. Or it could be.

Speaker6: Here’s where I would start with that.

Alan Laidlaw: Just very quickly. I would start by asking you and Andrew, and actually, I would prefer to have some meetings with just you two and talk about. Your goals and fears and everything, right? Like I don’t know what goes on on Friday, but where I would start is let’s imagine the, you know, some spaces, some some kind of experience that you want. And then work backwards. Get forgetting that experience and try and actually imagine what are the technical aspects. That would need to be lined up in order to get anything close. Right. And then the goal of that is to figure out what are the technical Unknowns, the actual like we’re equating this with like physical laws, right? We’re trying to understand what the gravity is and the optics are of this new material. And and it’s not just the material of VR and XR or the platform or the device, but it’s also the inputs and outputs. Right? So like I, I think there’s a class of research that simply needs to understand the core capabilities to, I guess, frame it down. Right. And that that’s an early. Trajectory of research. There’s other stuff that’s aspirational, but those things go out of line if we find out that the gravity is too heavy. Right.

Speaker6: Yeah. Go ahead.

Frode Hegland: Adam, I know you’re Swedish, not Danish, but I think we should, in an interesting way, think about Lego blocks a little bit because I fully agree with what Alan said about, look, you know, thinking about something big and then working backwards. Absolutely agree. And I’ve been trying to do that for a while. I know some of you have as well. What I mean by Lego blocks is I really, really, really want an architecture for getting data up and down. And to decide what that means is really complicated, as we’ve discovered, you know, how do this? Does the user know code versus their own library versus an ACM library versus other things? How is that even done? Also, when changes are made in XHR space, maybe it’s one of Rob’s really, really cool tags or whatever it might be. How is that communicated back to the computer? This really, really basic thing I think is so important because we are going to put, you know, once we build a something, we want to change it. There’s no question. Obviously the first one will not be the final. So we then need to have a really powerfully flexible, not optimized transport mechanism. So, you know, Adam and Andrew builds a thing and and Rob says, you know, what about the blah blah. And there is something in the system to support the blah blah. I really think that would be core research and other things to say about Randall. I won’t say here. Randall, you look so different from yesterday. You look flat.

Speaker4: Everything’s blurry behind him.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, there wasn’t blurry yesterday. It was really odd. What’s changed? Anyway, we’ve talked about a lot of things today. Brundle and now coming up towards the end of the meeting the person told me that on Friday. I’m saying Bill Atkinson for three hours. So that’s really fun. And one thing that’s been weighing on me is the notion of a graph, as we talked about briefly yesterday. So I’ve talked to the group about maybe for a little while, we consider having other things than documents in our graph space, library space, just as a thought exercise, because I’ve invited all of you, obviously in slack on the thread that I just posted to write any questions you might have for Bill considering he invented HyperCard, he may very well have thoughts for us on HyperCard and XR or how it relates to this stuff. So that’s why today we’re being very loose and we’re not thinking just about the basic stuff we have before. And then, just as you walked in, Adam asked a question of what should the research be right now? Elon said we should think about huge stuff and then work our way back. And I added to it. My really, really great wish is to have a robust metadata and data mechanism between the computer and the headsets, because we are going to change stuff a lot. So if we have a transport mechanism that allows the data to be there, it can be done. You know, I’m a horrible project manager for my own projects. I consider all of them research. I’ve asked my programmers sometimes to do a little thing and they say, are you effing joking? It would mean re-architecting the whole thing, because that was set in stone in the beginning. And you’re very experienced with this and you want to avoid this. And so that’s why I’m just being very. Give us a superhighway.

Speaker6: That’s it.

Frode Hegland: Superhighway. Al Gore to rescue.

Alan Laidlaw: Hey, Randall. Yeah. Yeah, it’s just some of the tone of the earlier talks that I hope were kind of universally acknowledged. Is that. This is a lot of fuck around, find out kind of scenario where we just like, dabble with the materials and get a better understanding of some of the possibility space and the try and disabuse our our assumptions as much as we can. Let’s get a sense of material.

Speaker6: I think that the.

Alan Laidlaw: Article that I posted, I wholeheartedly agree with that the use cases for vision are very limited at the moment, and it would be great to find out better specific use cases, but that goes into stuff that deals with behaviors way more than even technology. Right. And and that. Why I want to figure out the technical research early on is because. There’s a feeling that a lower fi. Baseline could be. Lead to better gains in the future, and a lower Fi would be something like. And and and perhaps something that’s like a minimal graph representation. Who knows? I’m not going to suggest anything, but like, I want to know the materials first to find. I mean, just like an artist. Would you want to know the materials to find what is the most evocative that you that you can handle? Anyway.

Frode Hegland: Did that answer your question, Adam?

Adam Wern: Well. Not really. So what would the. I would like to be a bit more specific then. So what could be very specific research questions that we should look into the next few weeks, for example? So what would help specific.

Speaker6: Yeah, yeah.

Adam Wern: What would help you to, to understand the medium better or the limitations or, or the possibility space or or

Speaker6: If, if.

Alan Laidlaw: You know of where I can find things that I can read up on and specifically one example I’m interested in at all, but like, I want to I would love to know what the, the researchers and engineers who worked on Vision Pro what they looked at. I want to get a sense. There’s no way that I can catch up to a imagine.

Speaker6: Come work for us. Okay.

Alan Laidlaw: I guess I could do that.

Adam Wern: But then you can’t talk to us anymore about that.

Speaker6: So you cannot, right? Yeah.

Alan Laidlaw: But but I want to know, like there’s a feeling. And it was a kind of a viral video a couple of weeks ago, I guess, about like, hey, the truth is, a lot of people get seasick in, in VR. And that is like, that’s going to be a huge limitation, right? I find those limitations fascinating. I don’t find them to be discouraging. I want to know about all those limitations. That’s where I want to start. And so if since I can’t do that firsthand, I would love to read up on other studies that have happened about that.

Speaker6: Okay, so there’s.

Speaker8: A ton of pretty solid academic work. U-n-c chapel Hill has done some really good work.

Speaker6: Where’s Dave Bowman?

Frode Hegland: Randall, can you put some of that in a slack thread, please? That’ll be good for all of us.

Speaker6: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Adam Wern: And a support post entertainment. So here is a where, for example, when I, when I’m, when we have this limitation of close focus distances and the risks of making us very sick because, yeah, it’s hard. It could be that with the, that we still work with our hands at close distance, with representations of the objects that we see at a distance. So we have miniatures or controls for, for the objects that the because one observation I have in realized with proficiency, we start to look, look away from your hands. In the beginning, you always look at your hands when you play piano and everything or yeah, when you work with tools. But after a while or when you drive in the beginning, you look at the pedals and the steering wheels or or the instruments, and after a while you’re reading traffic or you’re doing other things. And I guess for some things in VR, we will get to the point with profit. And and the same goes for the mouth and, and often for the keyboard. For some people, at some point it’s a part of you and you look elsewhere. And I wonder if if it could be that we still work with the hands and with the, with kind of mini mini maps or tools representing the space, but that we, that we optimize for the best focal distance. For example where thinking of text specifically that we could select things by doing things to a small representation where you’re reading at the distance and the and that could so it will be a dual. Folks. Well, I mean.

Frode Hegland: That’s what a magician does. Right. And Harry Potter, it’s a lot of this stuff and affected a distance. I think that makes complete sense in terms of research, though. I really, really want more time on the transport mechanism. Don’t forget, a third of this project is metadata. But it is the third point. So in order to do and one thing, Adam, I love you dearly. But the one thing that concerns me is your brilliant making of prototypes that you don’t share because you cannot share them. So that’s why I really, really want us now to focus on getting a rich, robust and simple way to get the metadata from here to there and back, because then we can start doing exactly what you’re talking about. We can start experimenting with that because, you know, discussing it as a general thing or trying it only on Adam’s prototype is severely not enough.

Speaker6: So that’s a great point.

Alan Laidlaw: Getting a community. Sorry. Go ahead Adam.

Adam Wern: No no no. Take it I can.

Alan Laidlaw: I think the. Well, I’ll just say. It would be really useful to have a.

Alan Laidlaw: A stock of users who can come in and try something, knowing that even their experience is going to be limited because it’s going to be a toy example. They’re not actually going to use it for their work, but it does beg a question of which device we focus on. And that gets into some gnarly stuff. But I think that it is important that in whatever way we get outside of our own minds and assumptions.

Frode Hegland: Yes. And I think, well, first of all, in terms of what we focus on, it probably will have to be the quest. I think the, the Apple one will be a bit of a Rolls Royce because first of all, you can’t just. Alan, I couldn’t come over now and put it on your head because you need optical instruments. Right. So it’s got some severe limitations now. It’s a window to the future. So I think that’s okay. But Adam, sorry for jumping in, replying to Alan, please. Adam, what were you saying?

Adam Wern: Yeah, well, on your last point is, I don’t know how it is, but is there a default set of lenses, or do you need to have those corrective lenses, or could you just use them as a quest with no corrections?

Frode Hegland: If it depends on your eyes? So I’m going to own optician here in America tomorrow because I need to for my you can’t wear glasses in it, right. So you can’t wear contacts. Soft contacts is not doesn’t support hard contacts. So that means that tomorrow I have to go spend lots of money on optician to get an American prescription because UK isn’t allowed. And that’s totally understandable. And so I’m, I’m going to order both a set of contacts and the Zeiss inserts. So if I have the the Zeiss insert are magnetic so I can take them out. So if someone comes to visit me and they have contacts with perfect vision, they can just put the headset on. That’s not a problem. Yeah, but if you have any kind of correction needed, then that’s a problem.

Adam Wern: I guess many of the Apple Vision Pro questions will be answered in a few weeks when when it’s public and everyone is talking about those details. So I think we could instead of. And I think we could wait a few weeks and many things will be answered by other people. And of course, people working with it can be more free to talk as well. In some about some things. So at least. About the public things that everyone knows at that point. Yeah. Which is then public. As far as.

Alan Laidlaw: The research goes, Adam. And this may be exactly where you’re going. The way I’ve been thinking about it is parallel lines of research. So I’ve only mentioned, like, one of them. But there are other lines of research that you know, I have more control over as to like, where it can go. And I’d still need help and, and input on those.

Speaker6: Okay. Go ahead. But.

Frode Hegland: But we do need to get the transport mechanism done.

Adam Wern: But I think it seems like the developers are less worried about that than you. So. Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know about the others. Of course we have to build it, but we’re not. I’m much more worried about the other things. So we have to. Of course we have to build it. And of course, we need to as we need gesture interfaces and so on. We need to build those and we know that, but it’s we’re not that worried. And especially for kind of, for the first, the coming two months we could have test documents working with the most simple system just delivered by a web server. And that will be enough to try out many, many, many things. And the other thing are having user documents or your specific documents. We have a suggested pipeline for that, but we don’t need to rush that thing because it’s. For now, we could just upload them to web server and at later point we could could replace, yeah, parts of that plumbing with.

Speaker8: One thing that’s really worth being aware of is that JavaScript really makes JavaScript. And building JavaScript specifically inside a web browser makes a lot of this thing. This stuff just incredibly easier to manage than having strongly typed compile system that you’re having to distribute across multiple devices or multiple, let alone multiple languages and things like that. The idea that you can have client and server both talking this weakly typed, dynamically, dynamically sort of interpreted language with this enormous swath of not just built in APIs, but also third party libraries, you know, like you just go like, oh, what is the JavaScript solution for PDF? It’s called Pdf.js. You know, like, what are the what is the solution for being able to create a peer connection? It’s called peer JS. Like it’s it’s it’s just anticlimactic if you’re doing any other language. Randall.

Frode Hegland: Randall. No it’s not. Look, guys, I am tired of hearing how easy it is without saying it done.

Speaker6: Okay.

Adam Wern: Well, it still needs to be done, of course, but. But if you, as an artist says that it’s very possible to take photographs of this bridge, then I go to, I don’t know.

Frode Hegland: Send it to you.

Adam Wern: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you have to do that at some point. But I for me, it’s enough to trust you as an, as a photographer that it’s possible.

Frode Hegland: It’s not that the analogy doesn’t hold up because, you know, I’ve been very gentle on the whole how to do things thing. Right. But a third of it is actually visual, meadow. It is a third of our entire project. Right. And to hear all kinds of different solutions is very, very useful. But to be able, you know, right now we have the 2022 or 2021 ACM hypertext. All of them have visual meta by default. It was built in. It’s a very limited visual meta. Right. We need a mechanism whereby that can go to the headset as data. Right? So it’s not just about having a Jason as a general thing. We need to implement it. And as you know, we also have mechanisms to do temporary data like I entity extraction and stuff in the document. We need a way to get that into the documents, because otherwise, to an extent, we’re focusing so much on the reading of a kind of picture of a PDF. If we’re going to spend any time looking at the library, the graph, that kind of stuff, we do need to get the stuff there. So.

Adam Wern: So what I’m hearing is not about the plumbing really, it’s more about or the, the challenge there is kind of extracting that, getting that data into, for example, PDFs in the end, or as a separate file and then extracting that data. So it’s it’s much less about the plumbing and actually transferring that data from the from a server or a laptop to a headset, because that is pretty much very it is very easy because that is what web does all the time, is that it’s very good at that. And it’s easy to do that. But to parse your visual meta, for example, that is that is a very. Yeah, that is a project in itself. And that was a different thing.

Speaker6: Yeah. We’re very careful.

Alan Laidlaw: Of scope creep. One is like a picture of the bridge that for a photographer. And then the other is like saying, well, no, I wanted to see people kissing on the bridge.

Speaker6: Okay.

Alan Laidlaw: And that’s like an incredibly different thing to arrange people kissing anyway.

Frode Hegland: Go away from the bridge. Right. I have code for parsing visual media and it is available. It’s on the website to be downloaded. Are you leaving, Andrew? Okay? Yep. See you later. Thank you. I look forward to seeing you next week. And the end person. Right. So I have code. I you know, I have reader reader does this stuff already. The code has been extracted. It can be downloaded, used at any time. And there has been a lot of talk about I think it was Ken who talked about the value of doing heavy lifting on the computer side, not the headset side. Right. So for me to do what my coders to provide you with a JSON or whatever of all of this stuff is something I can do. Right. But you need to tell me what you need. To put it on the headset. Your boss of the headset, you and Andrew. Right. So you don’t need to worry about parsing the visual meta at all. You just need to tell me what format you want it to and then how it’s going to come back. And then we can. Experimenting. I represent an outside developer in the sense of the Mac side of things, and it needs to be easy for me to tell another developer to do the same thing.

Speaker6: So

Adam Wern: Well, what we said so far, if you just dump a JSON of that information and we will come back to the what the information is about the library, for example. That is enough for us. If you dump, dump that information in, if you put at a later point could read such a JSON file, for example, with that library information where documents are positioned or similar, that would be a first step, but it’s still in order to know what information should be in the library, we need some sort of use case and and design mock. Yeah. And design a design idea because you can’t really without knowing what to do. We don’t know what data we want to have in there.

Frode Hegland: Absolutely, Adam. And that is why. And based on your impetus, I put together a PDF that I posted of a scenario of working in a cafe where you take the document, you say this, this and this. So I’ve done one version of that. It would be great whoever wants to do different versions of that, why don’t.

Speaker6: We why don’t we table.

Alan Laidlaw: This until after you to do the onboarding and figure out that stuff? Because that seems like pretty.

Speaker6: Well, I don’t want.

Alan Laidlaw: To fall into the same patterns of urgency when.

Frode Hegland: But. Alan. Okay, let me let me ask Adam then what are you guys working on now if you’re not working on this?

Adam Wern: Well, I’m not working on visual method because I don’t know the use case yet. What that will be. What I’ve been doing the last week is text fidelity. I’ve been exploring text fidelity to to see how much we can actually read, as in kind of close reading, not just skimming, but to see how much we can crank that up on the quest. I don’t have the Apple Vision Pro.