Video: https://youtu.be/0Iu8fGrntGM
Chat log: https://futuretextlab.info/2022/01/14/chat-14-jan-2022/
Mark Anderson: [00:00:00] The number of books I can say is that nuance is quite hard. More than more than saying, I’ve got it. I sort of find difficulty anyway. So there is no it was here, I’ll go and find, I’ll put it in the chat anyway, my good reads Earl. And these these are all things if I haven’t lent them to somebody that I have.
Rafael Nepô: [00:00:28] There’s a there’s a printer I saw they’re getting smaller and smaller, but basically it’s a it’s a little it’s a printer. You know, the size of pretty much this wall from from here to here, and it’s a print on demand service and you just choose the file. It doesn’t matter if if it’s out of print or anything, you select the book and it prints a book and it comes out, you know, a real physical book. And oh, wow, okay, those those would be. I’m going to see if I can find it here, but it’s it’s on demand printing for four books, and it’s pretty incredible.
Mark Anderson: [00:01:09] Well, I did find that sort of slightly sprung to mind when I was doing this good read stuff the other day because, you know, and it was saying, well, what version of this book is so well, it was published in nineteen ninety three. But now Springer have worked out how to remake the second hand market by, you know, only only offering digital reprints on demand and charging you, you know, 90 quid for an out of date book for which you want one article. It’s become a bit difficult, so I’ve just pasted that URL should take you to ignore the cookery books and stuff. That was a mistake in the way I went, but most of my sort of quasi academic reference bookshelf is there. Far too much state of this stuff, which intrigues me tremendously, but I have absolutely no skillet and I’m rather an observer in that field.
Frode Hegland: [00:02:06] We have to Brandels, and this is quite fascinating. But now we only have one, that’s not enough.
Rafael Nepô: [00:02:11] We need to for VR Brandel
Frode Hegland: [00:02:13] Demand stereo vision.
Mark Anderson: [00:02:17] We’re going to we’re going to get a Lawnmower Man.
Frode Hegland: [00:02:22] The reason I was late today was immersed as one of those apps that I have been playing with, and some of it’s absolutely mind blowing. But I think they’re on onboarding is absolutely mind blowing the iPad. And, you know, I’m sitting there working with my screens and because my hands are tracked. I can actually press buttons on my screen, which is cool. However, I mean my actual computer screen. However, I so easily just destroy my whole setup because they have these yellow bars around and you’re supposed to do this for that and this for that and whatever it is literally playing a new instrument. So I’m learning it slowly frustrated. And of course, that’s a great opportunity for us. But it meant that I’ve taken over my sound and vision, so I had to restart to get immersed away. So Peter, what you saw there in the beginning was basically me and VR looking completely flat.
Mark Anderson: [00:03:16] So you stuck you basically you got stuck in the metaverse and couldn’t get back.
Frode Hegland: [00:03:21] I don’t like the term metaverse. I don’t want to use it. Cyberspace was just fine.
Rafael Nepô: [00:03:29] I was stuck in my imagination for a bit.
Frode Hegland: [00:03:33] So I’m going to share my screen with you guys because there is something we do need to discuss jointly, group. Just make sure I can see you. So if you want to please feel free to go to our website as well. And we now need to decide what that means. I’m going to turn quiet mode on because people. Right. So we have to decide all of us what we want this to be and how we want to work together. This is a very casual, happy group. But there will be some more stuff happening and we have to decide what to put on or not. Alan and I had a brief chat this week. I think it was yesterday actually where we decided that, Oh, there’s Alan I can speak from for us anyway. So we just started the whole looking at this and how we have to decide on things together, and one of the things is under publications, we have a book, journal and newsletter. We decided it’s probably best to have a journal. A newsletter separates because they serve very different purposes. The Journal is intended to be mostly transcript from our monthly guest presenter meeting. Plus any articles that we write and respond to. So I’m trying to make it like an academic journal. Of course, we don’t have academic credentials or anything like that, but that’s the model, just a casual one for this community newsletter. Alan will speak about in a bit, but that’s going to be more brief. And so I’ll do the journal as an editor. Alan will do the newsletter and these things will talk to each other. The journal will be PDF, which I think is important because the extra affordances and that can be part of our experiments. Then we go down to events. We have our annual symposium and monthly guest speaker. I should put annual in the title, I should know, because I have monthly. That live WordPress editing. Are you not impressed? Please, I know
Mark Anderson: [00:05:40] If you did it in times, Roman, it would look like a very senior computer science professor’s web page because there is no formatting at all.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:05:50] Yeah, and I would have been I would be really impressed if it was 2012. Yeah, I mean,
Frode Hegland: [00:06:00] I’m a bit of a minimalist guy, but we can always talk about the design
Alan Laidlaw: [00:06:03] And know the look and vibe. I mean, for for just doing something without. Hemming and hawing, I dig it like it’s awesome.
Frode Hegland: [00:06:19] So then we have thanks. These two bits here worth mentioning. One is projects I’ve always had a problem with how I connect my supposedly commercial, even though we’re operating at a huge loss but is still a commercial company with all these other things because I don’t want you guys to think that suddenly your stooges for my sales pitch and vice versa, I don’t want you guys to feel that you cannot if you’re doing something that’s relevant to this listed two. So we’ll discuss that at length. But that’s why that’s there now, of course. Visual matter. And then finally, the community, one thing that seemed clear when and when I learned I were talking, and I hope you will agree, and I’m very happy to talk at length about that. I think there is a difference between us as an end crowd, and we shouldn’t enlarge too quickly because even my good friend Bjorn, when he was here, it was a hugely relevant guy to get him into the community takes time. It was a bit of a kind of a wake up call for me and we would love to have more people. But it can’t just be random people who don’t really care about the subject because it’s a it’s a huge overhead when new people come in. So therefore, all the stuff above community is for everyone. This stuff is more for us. However, we do put all the video transcripts and chat blogs on here, so we operate in an open manner. So someone is interested about being serious. They’re welcome to it. And within that, I have this link to our resources. All I have here is Brandel timeline. And the way that I posted it was, well, first of all, why I did it is when you’re in VR, space to type in URLs is boring and difficult.
Frode Hegland: [00:08:01] So this is, I think, where we can all just add anything we think is cool and say why. And the only structure is it’s in the VR resources. So it’s intended to be used while we are in VR space. And here I’ve tagged it by Brandel so anybody can tag his work so he doesn’t have to do everything and vice versa for all of us. And very, very. Finally, there’s also this thing called discussions. This is where I think we should post what would normally be a blog. I posted a link here to a data set and a sentence just saying this would be amazing if we did it in VR and that kind of stuff. And also. Similar things. So I’d like your comments very much, and I would also like you guys to think about how you want to be a part of this. You know what benefits and what are you willing to put into it? Because that needs to be then you? Yeah, just a second. And I’ll hand it over to you, Alan. It needs to be a continual open discussion because, as I’ve already said, any one of us with commercial interests, we have to be careful that everyone’s happy with how that’s dealt, but equally the opposite of being part of too many Californians sitting having coffee in the evening, saving the world, and nothing ever gets done. So I’m hoping we can find a ground that we’re all happy to put in whatever level of effort and everybody understands everyone else. Over to you, Alan.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:09:31] Yeah, I don’t I don’t want to like obviously like want to open this up to the group, but before diving at all the feedback, I kind of want to present the other end of the spectrum, right? So in this is based off of what Fred and I talked about yesterday, right? So like one sense, we want to keep what we’re doing right now. You know, the same and not fuss with it, right? Because it’s great. I like it. It’s my security blanket. Or something? Might my pillow that I cry into after a bad workweek and actually I’ll share my screen a little bit just to help go through the some of the points? It won’t take long, I swear. Let’s see. Where are we? Right here? Ok. So there’s that, and I don’t want to mess with that. I’ve sort of been calling. That just, you know, for for sake of ease, like the weekly whiteboard. Right? Just our our jam session. On the other side, there’s the the hey, we all are here for a reason. There’s something that bothers us. There’s something that interests us. How can we move that forward? Um. And it seems a theme that we’ve had from the beginning with Adam, the interfaces you’ve made, you know, a theme is, Hey, we we can use what we’re doing right now to create the core material to create a set of experiments or projects.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:11:25] Right. I personally really dig that too, and I want to actually contribute to that. So there’s actually this weird like triangle or something of of different interests, and I think if we do it right, we can do it in a way that doesn’t take a whole lot of freaking effort. On the newsletter side, I sort of feel the opposite of frode in that I don’t want it to be PDF. I want it to be almost automatic based on things that we found or talked about or popped up. I don’t want it to be a transcript. I don’t want to be a deep dive. It can point to that stuff. But mainly, I just want to be a friendly entryway for people. Hopefully, that friendly entryway will also be a revenue builder, we could do something with patron, maybe that can help us perhaps fund some experiments. But even if that doesn’t work out? I love the idea of people doing their own thing and being able to kind of. Turbo boost it through future of text and. Fantastic ability to, I don’t know, knock on people’s door and say, you know, like, become interested in this. So if Adam Brandel, you’re working on something and you know, it doesn’t like you do anything with touch or text, but still kind of want to channel for it, I think.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:12:51] Personally, I think that would be awesome. I mean, same with everybody else. And then the final thing with the newsletter like. I don’t have I have some ideas, but I am not highly opinionated about where that goes. So if you guys want to do a newsletter together. Awesome. If you have no interest in it and it’s just going to be my little thing that gets shot out every couple of weeks. Awesome. All right. So that’s that’s about that’s about it later on. I do want to show you guys some of this and how it does tie into. I think a good way to figure out like. How these meetings could be more efficient, you know, like I was just adding in some things to talk about if we weren’t talking about all this and you guys are all welcome to add to this and also I can send this email if you ever find interesting tidbits, articles, whatever, you could just mail this to me. It will pop up in my things app and I can add it to this area. Ok, I’ll stop talking now. Would you say wrote your own view?
Frode Hegland: [00:14:13] What software was that?
Alan Laidlaw: [00:14:17] That I had on the screen. Yeah, that’s Kraft, OK.
Frode Hegland: [00:14:21] It’s just when you said things, there was a to do list called Things a while back and I just wanted to.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:14:25] Yeah, yeah, that’s things is another app that I use. Kraft doesn’t have an email for ingestion, but things does, which is why I love it. So I’m going to give you guys my things email address. Thank you so that you guys can email it and it’ll show up in my. Like list that I can then pull into here. Well, so what if you guys are interested in that, you know, whatever? Cool.
Frode Hegland: [00:14:54] Peter.
Peter Wasilko: [00:14:55] Well, I think we should start to make up a list of affordances that we want in a dream unified platform. Probably all of these tools were built using open source libraries available through the node ecosystem or the other primary distribution platforms and whatever programming language they were developed in. There’s no reason that we can’t go through and find all of those. Labelling. Housing and utilities is out there and start tying them together well with a single integrated platform where we won’t need to go off and deal with a thousand login accounts because what seems to happen is each one of these systems comes up with their own little web based tooling. And then you have to get an account or you have to show your credentials from one of the other big platform things. And this account proliferation is starting to drive me absolutely mad. The number of passwords that I have in my password manager is absolutely staggering. God knows what happens if the Apple password service ever fails or. If they were logging in with a Facebook account and then Facebook decides that you said something in the blog post that Zuckerberg doesn’t like and suddenly find some deep platform from that world. And not only do you lose your Facebook world then, but you lose all of the connected tools and applications and you end up losing access to your data. It’s all very, very scary. That’s why I like the idea of pushing some of the groups out there. They’re trying to separate your data from the services that are manipulating your data. I think that’s sort of like the critical use point there. We’re just so dependent upon Big Tech blessing us with accounts and tying them together with a pit.
Frode Hegland: [00:16:38] I think that’s a worthwhile and important point. If and when we decide to to build something together, I think it would be really good if we can now just decide on a little bit so we don’t spend too much time on it because the community forever defining itself is also really, really boring. But if you guys just want to say
Peter Wasilko: [00:16:59] What I say, there is just simply start making a list of enabling technologies that we just simply list. What if one says we want something? On let’s let’s have one so that when we see something that we want, like email and just we add that to the list and have a list price of
Alan Laidlaw: [00:17:15] One hundred percent. We have an expedition called like dream machine and start to make a list of those attributes. I think it’s perfect to to. It’s awesome to break it down into pieces and put it somewhere where we can talk about it. But that is a lot of what you mentioned. I agree with you, but it’s part of the death strangle that we seem to be in with Big Tech. There’s there’s not a foreseeable way out of
Frode Hegland: [00:17:39] It, but this does assume that we are building something together, and I don’t think that’s. No, it doesn’t. Well, OK, we’re still OK, for instance, Adam Belt, a citation view for the web based on Mark’s data. That’s something that I would like to put on this site as being our project. But that depends on what Adam and Mark thinks about that. And also, I would like to go and try to get some money for this, some funding that we would, depending on what is possible or not. We will either. I mean, it would be great if we could all pay ourselves, you know, simple. But if we want to pay for some external programming, whatever. But at this point, I need to hear from specifically Adam and Brandel, how much or how little they actually want to be in this community in that sense, before we talk about affordances and big companies and all of that stuff. So I’m going to go with Adam because he has to pay.
Adam Wern: [00:18:49] How do you mean be in this community, I didn’t really get in in terms of of the activities we discussed today, do you mean the newsletter and the resources section and so on? Or do you mean the building prototypes together for something more than a dream machine or a part of it?
Frode Hegland: [00:19:10] All of the above. And to be more specific.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:19:14] Does anybody stand out or was any part problematic? Go ahead.
Frode Hegland: [00:19:18] Yeah, I mean. I have to decide now that I’ve finished my PhD thesis. A lot of you know, that was my big excuse. I’m working on this oh, rest of the world, you know, that kind of stuff. So I have to look at where I’m going to go. I’m going to focus on this community and my software and a few other things. So I would like to invest a lot in this because first of all, our Monday and Friday chats are really both pleasant. You guys are very nice people. And it’s also very inspirational. But it’s but, yeah, one of the things I would like to do is actually to run a proper normal research lab where we get hired. We decide we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that. But there is a lot of overhead for someone running a research lab and raising money that is not my favorite activity in the world. So that’s why at this point, if we do decide that this is only a chat Monday, Friday for all of us or some of us, absolutely fine. But if we do decide that we’re going to do something in VR as one project? Fine. But it’s just that we have to be very honest with ourselves and each other. So we get going with this stuff. It’s just super, super important because I don’t I don’t want to lose this community. I think it’s incredible. Right? So Adam, the questions for you then is do you want to spend some time outside of Monday and Friday? Do you want us to be one of the places to list your code? How do you feel about your level of investment at this point?
Adam Wern: [00:20:55] So it’s a bit hard to answer, but I’ll answer what I can right now. My main priority. What I feel is most meaningful and interesting is making. Prototypes or or some or maybe something even closer to a product, it can be free, it can be a research prototype that you can download to actually use for something real. But if I could choose how I use my time here with the community, I would prefer to do as much of that as possible and as little of the newsletter, resource gathering and the admin stuff. Not because I don’t want to do like administrative work, but I don’t want more more admin than needed. So I want to fly a travel lightly and do prototypes discuss it as as much as possible, come up with many of them and maybe combine a few of them into something useful. If I could do that, I would be happiest, I think. But I would also alternatively, I would if that can’t happen here, if it’s more general here, I would lie like to discuss text in text in general, what it does to us for us. And it can be combined, of course. But the ideas with the embodiment or how we work with text and the future texts and the nature of text and and the boundaries of text and such things are more a bit more theoretical, maybe and or or process oriented, but not tools or tech. So that is one first answer.
Frode Hegland: [00:22:50] I think that’s a great answer, and I’ll give the mic to Brandel in a second. But I just wanted to say one thing I’ve kind of tried in the past is to separate what Monday and Fridays are. So I think that maybe once we get past this, this is basically our dating game. This is insanely boring for everybody outside of this, right? Once we have a settlement like you just said, then maybe we do Monday’s discussions. We try to be not product or not feature centric. We talk about text, for instance, as you suggest. You know, on Fridays, we talk about more what we’re building, something like that. It’s just a thought. Anyway, we’ll decide on that later. But Brandel, you seem to be saying, ditto a lot.
Brandel Zachernuk: [00:23:35] Yeah. So I really like thinking through doing and so I very much enjoy being able to to to to make stuff or make ideas about stuff, so, you know, I would. I would also add that I’m not. Uh, I don’t think that it needs to be sort of the tyranny of those developer and client in terms of being able to sort of dictate the terms of a discussion. People who describe applications are just as useful as people who who build them. And in fact, a lot of the time one of my favorite things is to take because I like working in the abstract. And then I like working on the concrete, and I don’t I’m not very good at the stuff in the middle. So. So one of the things that I like doing is wallowing in the theoretical. Then somebody makes a sketch, and then I turn that into something, something a lot more tangible and real. And I do that with visual art, as well as with sort of prototypes and software and stuff like that. In terms of my time and what I would tend to devote, like I do sort of software development, programming, sketching more or less every night as a hobby. And some of those involve text and some of those don’t. I would be I totally comfortable either hosting or linking to, you know, anything text related that I am comfortable sharing publicly through future of text, as well as having that as a forum for discussion of it.
Brandel Zachernuk: [00:25:05] And I would be overjoyed for any of our venues to be sort of devoted to the introspection and discussion of those things, because too often people see very, very little of what it is that those sort of sketches and interventions are in terms of being devoted to a longer term project or a specific thing that we all are building together. I just don’t think we have clear enough site toward a thing that makes sense to devote that level of effort to. Like I said, one of the things that I like doing is thinking through doing, but one of the things that requires is a commitment to throwing a lot of stuff away, which is another thing that I I’m happy to do and I encourage people to do until I actually get their plan, right? So, yeah, so. So in terms of actually embarking on a project to build a large thing, I’m I’m pretty reluctant to do that until until there’s been a lot of prototyping and wasting of of little bits and pieces of one to two day one to two evening sort of software development. And that’s one of the beauties of the web, is that it allows you to prototype, iterate and throw away and move on and have a seemingly relatively modular components that you can kind of pick up and reuse along the way.
Frode Hegland: [00:26:27] Yeah, that was really oh, as Alan has has had you, OK? Go ahead. I’ll put my hand up as well.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:26:33] No, that’s fine. I was, you know, three chairs hands up, but I’ve already talked a lot. I can bring it up later.
Frode Hegland: [00:26:40] Ok, just really briefly. Then let’s just I know more people to talk about. Let’s just say this year, Doug’s anniversary 9th of December. We want to have a demo of something, and it’s really important that we spend a lot of time trying to figure out what that might be. So we don’t consider that waste of time. And if we end up in the ninth of December with nothing to show but a very good description of what we went through and why we failed. Equally good. Ok, Alan. And then over to Rafael, maybe.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:27:11] Ok. Sure, yeah, OK, so to touch base on all the various points, I feel like I’m in alignment with a lot of it or at least the way I see it. Prototyping over full product because full product is part of my day job, too, and the thing is, is that once you get past the interesting bits of solving the problem, everything’s a long slog of bugs and cause and that kind of garbage. And it’s just until we get funding. Like if we made a thing and then got funding or built a startup to actually bulletproof it, that’s awesome. But I don’t see that right now in the charts and things that we’re having. I do see a great place for prototypes, for the public to see with low barrier of entry. I see a multiplicity of them. Not a single interface, but hey, here’s a here’s a little stab at a way to do this, and here’s a way to do it in VR and and and so with the newsletter, the way I was thinking about it is that it’s my own kind of like sifting through what we talk about and what we’re inspired by in these talks in in such a way that we might be able to use it for further projects, right? Which is what I’m doing in craft. And that’s why you guys are all welcome to jump in there and screw around with it, because it’s sort of like a concept abstract first down to, you know, individual ideas. And. I personally want to make some prototypes. We talked about that yesterday. What was the other thing? I forgot the other thing.
Frode Hegland: [00:28:57] I’m going to take you to the other thing then. Sorry, Rafael, just one second. I am really, really excited by the journal, and I’m really happy that I don’t have to do the newsletter because the newsletter is a very different thing. What I want is for, let’s say Adam, who doesn’t like to write. He likes to do stuff right. At the end of the month, whatever date, we agree, I take some screenshots. I had no time the URLs. I write whatever Adam has said about that thing, and that goes on in the journal Simple. You know, in five years, we will have a cohesive set of journal entries where somebody spent some editorship. I’ll do the donkey work, but you can always put on WordPress in whatever categories stuff for me to put into the journal. So it’s not just a WordPress site that’ll Roth one day. So I think, no, I’m really excited by the idea of, I mean, the future of text book is nice, but it’s a complete scattershot as it should be. This is much more step by step. Ok, I’ll try to shut up for a few minutes. Rafael.
Rafael Nepô: [00:30:08] Ok. So I took some notes here also to to answer a couple of questions that were thrown regarding the website and both how I see the future of text and how I can collaborate or list of possibilities. So I think the future of text in this whole project that Frode started is quite important, especially now that we’ve had it for 10 years already. I’ve been following the presentation since 2013, and I’ve always been fascinated by all of the different ideas that were presented and how we’re still talking about these things, and they haven’t yet been solved. So I see it continuing into the future and it truly will be, you know, the biggest survey ever taken. Talking about text and this compilation of both the books journals newsletter, pretty much everything that that is being published will keep getting added to this to this big library on text. So I think it’s quite an important project that Frode started, and I think I want to keep being part of it. But I’m not a builder, so I’m probably not going to be prototyping things like like Brandel or or Atom has been doing with code, you know, turning an idea into a quick prototype. I’m also on on Alan’s point of view of prototype over product because product is my my day job with my company and I don’t want to have another one of those.
Rafael Nepô: [00:31:52] So I’m all hands on for testing prototypes. Even when you know, when Adam made his version, I made a quick, a quick mockup to visualize the information in a different way as well. So basically, on the collaboration part, I try to join the conversations as much as possible because I this is, you know, it’s it’s one hour of kind of free time that I managed to sneak in. But doing things outside of this one hour conversation, or now it’s it’s on two hours in the calendar, so it’s a little bit longer. It’s a little difficult because of all of the other schedule things. So I don’t see myself participating on my, you know, outside of of the conversation here because I simply don’t find a lot of time for that. Even replying to emails, it’s difficult because I read a skim over the emails, but doing a deep dive and giving a reply worthy of the email is something that also takes time. So I will be I will keep collaborating. I will keep doing whatever I can do on the time, but for it to become a full fledged product or a full fledged project.
Rafael Nepô: [00:33:10] You know, that’s where a little bit of complexity and logistics kicks in. And then, of course, investment is necessary to to get people to build the code on the day to day basis, but even to have, you know, a date for things because once we have, you know, we always do things on on Doug’s anniversary, which are it’s always in December, it’s always a celebration for for fraud and for the projects that he delivers. But even then, breaking down a project to reach a delivery date on that date, you know, that requires structure. And then that structure we don’t have we have conversations every week. So I think it looks like future effects is 10 years old already. So it’s growing up. And as it grows, more complexity, more infrastructure, more people, more resources, all of these more and more and more things kind of kick in if we want to reach another level of of the community. If not, then, you know, just having weekly conversations, it’s totally fine by me. I always learn different things. I always meet different people. I’m OK as well with how things are. And that’s a little bit of my point of view regarding the topics.
Frode Hegland: [00:34:31] That’s really, really nice, unexpected knowing you, Rafael, the things you said regarding the whole kind of December launch thing. I agree on everything you said. It’s just the book has to be annual and it’s usually on. Well, the first time it was on Pins available day and then this last year, we did a bit different. But I think, yes, it does require structure, but I’m already spending too much money on transcripts and so on for some tests and then for my own stuff, I simply can’t afford to spend money. And I know, you know that then you’re happy with it. But if we can, if we start, I mean, like this website now, I would like for all of you to please make your own page like little about me thing, because one of the things that’ll happen with that, I will put it into the newsletter as a glossary term. So, you know, that’s the PDF newsletter with visual media is, of course, my little sculpture. I’m very excited to build that and make it more and more valuable for us. But I also hope that, for instance, you would add, you know, under VR resources, for instance, you know, just keep adding and keep tagging it.
Frode Hegland: [00:35:43] I know tags can be problematic, but you know, we keep doing that. And then every month, it’s my job to take it from there. Put it in the newsletter. And then one of the key things is Alan just mentioned the ownership in the article that I sent around and he didn’t get it, which is, you know, a very good position. That discussion happened via email and the people who replied are now in the journal. So and whatever medium we can keep the discussion going when it comes to releasing the book, we will also have a compendium of 12 issues of the journal. So even if we don’t have a software product or software environment, we have a thing and that does not in any way negate your point, it makes it even stronger. You and Laura helped to do the social media before last year’s events. At some point, maybe we talk about it again around Easter. We need to decide if we have resources to do some kind of planning again. So I get you. We just have to wait a bit. Mr Anderson.
Mark Anderson: [00:36:48] Just a minute, I put my hand down. I just thought I’d sort of chime in on the round robin and in terms of input. But a quick thought before it passed from mine and you said, Well, you know, what might we be showing at the end of the year? To my mind, one of the things really we want to think about showing is the journal, albeit in different ways. So it might be the interpretation of it, maybe, but in a sense, and given the anniversary, it would be on. I think that’s the real term because a conversation about how afraid it is we sort of bridge between us was the fact that, well, we often mention Nelson the journaling. But can you actually go and look at a copy of that journal today? I think not. And that’s just as it is. But so to a certain extent, we have no model to follow other than the general concept. So I’m actually quite interested in the sense that all the things that we’re talking about in some way shape or form feed into into the model. So perhaps the journal as an idea is the tent pole to what’s being demoed. And that sort of gets us also off the hook of feeling we have to build a specific thing because it might be in essence a number of suspects on the on the common dataset that is the journal.
Mark Anderson: [00:38:04] So that’s the demo just going to contribution stuff like others. I mean, I know enough about coding to only be dangerous, so I’m unlikely to do stuff in there. But I probably what I bring to the table is, gosh, 15 odd years of working as an information plumber, which is an odd trade, but it’s basically fixing the stuff that other people would rather wasn’t broken and, you know, don’t want a fix. And that’s fine. So where I think it helps is things that I’m quite happy working on are things like data sets. So, you know, all all the year of work or certainly it took to make the data that I made earlier was made worthwhile by the visualizations and Adam made with it. It took him not much time in comparison. It’s just part of life pageant, as far as I can said. But genuinely, I mean, so it’s a sense of, well, if we want to do, you know, if we’re looking at a certain thing, if this is sort of a PR thing view we want to make and we need some data for it. I’m quite happy to sort of put in the time to make that because I do realize how important it is.
Mark Anderson: [00:39:14] Just all too often, just taking something that’s free and available you can scrape from somewhere looks really cool and sexy until you actually sort of take it apart. And then it’s too GAAP. So sometimes it, you know it wants to work on the other way. The other aspect of that I’m thinking about and this comes back from, I don’t know again, sort of 20 odd years of writing documentation on projects. I mean, you know, I think the tinderbox stuff I’ve been doing since I was nine. Everything is against a moving target. Us changes. The world changes what people do with the tools, change the affordances of the tool. I’ve been documenting change, so I’m quite used to documentation in that space rather than the more fixed thing of I built this thing. This is how it works. And one of the things that sticks with me is this thing of finding ways to break down the sort of the onboarding into a knowledge area. Now, whether it’s just providing a sort of translation of vernacular, whether it’s providing different sorts of demos or different metaphors to understand what we’re doing, that’s an area I’m quite comfortable with. And another thing is this thing where, you know, take one of the tools say that Adam or Brandel has made or the demos is the thing where someone simply said, That’s really cool.
Mark Anderson: [00:40:31] I’d like to do that. The code’s there. What the bit. That’s normally not explained to the comparative novice, especially if they’re not a programmer, is what data do I need? What does the data have to look like? And I know it always seems self-evident that it isn’t, and the best place to see that is to go to the D3 site and look, there’s wonderful visualizations. The only thing it doesn’t explain is it doesn’t even show you where the data is. You actually have to work out how on earth the data got into that picture. And it’s it’s a sort of it’s a generic blindness, but I think it’s one thing again, we can address as a way to make our discoveries more more, more accessible and portable. So someone says that’s really cool, but I want to go and do it in Portuguese or I want to go in Japanese or I want to do it, you know, using a different, a different data set. So I have a data set that looks roughly the same. But what structure does City anyway shall have at that point? But those are some ideas where I say, Oh, interesting, I’m I know enough to be dangerous about testing, so I’m willing to do that.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:41:41] I’d like to just touch on something. Rafael brought up. Which I really can’t stress enough. I think we’re here because Frode mentioned this last week, maybe the week before, you know, like I like that if I can’t show up for a month or two because work is slammed. That’s OK, right, I can jump back in and I can just sort of hear where it’s going. I can contribute where I, you know, have availability, but the the. The part about dedicating. Time or commitment outside of these touch points is is really tricky, and it’s it’s the it’s the blessing of the group, right? And it’s also kind of kind of the curse why I brought up the craft approach a couple of weeks ago, days ago, who knows? Is that for me personally, the most important thing is passive, easy, low friction capture. You know, if I’m on the subway, I can reorganize, restructure a little bit, get a thought down, and then I’m building towards something bigger, right? And that’s great. But it’s only because it’s so easy to get to and pass it right. So that’s probably not going to happen on WordPress, not to dog on WordPress. That’s like I can get in the habit of like putting some stuff there, but I think a lot of people can’t. The thing I wanted to stress is. Um, the support group aspect of this, the buddy system sort of thing that could be here to right, like there are invisible parts that could be just as helpful, right? Like, Hey Mark, can you can you tell me how I should go about a testing paradigm for X, you know, or or book shares or whatever, right? So. As want to put that out there by. Go ahead.
Frode Hegland: [00:43:48] Whoever else? Yeah, me, of course, because I’m obnoxious. I think it’s worth taking a brief detour into that article thing that I sent on ownership and B.R.. The reason it is really, really important in this community is for us not to be in a VR headset for at least part of the discussions at this point is a bit absurd because of all the new dimensions of possibilities we have. But the problem is the rooms. Right, and the objects and what I mean by that is we can’t just meet and, let’s say, VR horizons or whatever the Oculus branded room is. And then Adam says, Oh, I did this thing, open it on your browser and we have that object in VR in front of us. That’s not possible. But we will have to leave that room through the Firefox browser or something. Click on View and VR and then we’re all in our individual things and this a huge amount of effort has been invested as far as I understand to have another room for us. So that is really, really bizarre to be able to take the document into a shared room as not a flat document that can be done. It is currently not possible, right? That is hopefully going to be resolved, that the problem is what company will own that, you know, we come from the Mac and Windows world Linux, of course, too. But even having the Microsoft Office suite on both platforms, there were issues there and and all these things, this is really scary. Apple had opened many years ago where the document was the thing and you put in the tools. And when I met with Don Norman and I asked him what tools were being there by default, he said, it’s a marketing option.
Frode Hegland: [00:45:32] That’s when I instantly realized it would be a complete and utter failure. There was a wonderful idea. So one thing we have to fight for is whether, you know, like Marc and Pete are currently for good reasons sitting on the fence about Oculus. They should be able to interact with the thing in 2D. And we should be then be able to go in 3D if we want, and then they can change their mind. Whatever the objects and the things and the interactions and the data must absolutely be owned by the user. We cannot afford the bullshit we’ve had with the previous generations. And finally, just to close this thing, the little experience I’ve had with VR over the last few weeks, and I don’t spend that much time on it. Plus, writing that piece made me feel that what I’m seeing on the screen right now is a flattened version of the environment. It’s already happened to me. It didn’t take very long. It’s really, really bizarre. So, you know, it is just why am I viewing the world through a pinhole? And you know, something, severability, that’s exactly. Peter, you said that before, and that’s exactly brilliant. Brilliant term for that anyway. That’s why that was so important. And if we’re going to have a demo at whatever day, we need to at least look at this issue, even though we may end up for practicalities, just having completely free standing move things around kind of demos over. I’m sure there are comments on that. Oh, hands are up.
Mark Anderson: [00:46:57] A quick one. I was just thinking of that. Well, and just flying through my mind, she meant that last thing. So, you know, one of the things with the with the journal in terms of showing it to people, you know? Well, I think it is solving something. I think it’s for us to to actually work out and express more clearly what it is solving. I mean, if in a sense, it is a linear descendant of what Doug was doing back with any less and we think there was a value there and this whole thing augmentation, then that’s one of the things that during our discussions, we probably want to tease out. I mean, so if there’s a value in recording this stuff, so we have to make it more more tangible sort of both in terms of access and intellectually, then if I store lots of stuff, you know, underpants gnomes, if I store stuff, cloud, good thing happens. And so that’s another thing that we can perhaps unpick in coming months because in a sense, otherwise, why on earth are we making all this effort? I don’t think any of us are sitting here thinking it’s not worth the effort, whether any of us can articulate it in a very short sentence immediately, I’m not so sure. And so that’s maybe something for us to rummage through Brandel.
Brandel Zachernuk: [00:48:10] Rafael, did you have your hand up? All right. So in terms of the ownership base, in terms of the way that all of that stuff is sort of being hashed out, unfortunately, while on one level, it still is the tyranny of Big Tech. You know, the World Wide Web Consortium has has something called the Special Web Working Group, and they’re involved in working on the web specification, which is sort of done at the level of sensors and input. There’s also also a proposal for the model tag. There’s very serious discussion about making sure that that has the ability to construct a scene graph, which is the ability to to to reach in and identify, manipulate different parts of a 3D thing that exists semantically as well as right now. As you’ve probably noticed, WebGL, the 3D stuff on the web doesn’t really have much to do with web technologies. You can’t put images of text in it without a great deal of difficulty because some people can, but most people can’t. And so that’s a big problem. So in terms of the things that ownership would be kind of viewed out of in terms of the building blocks that people would be able to construct transportable transmittable sort of document fragments or reliable ways of saying this sort of source of truth should be hydrated should hydrate this kind of spatial data structure.
Brandel Zachernuk: [00:49:41] None of the work is there yet to show the urgency of those issues. And I think over the coming years, as more serious companies who are seriously devoted to people doing stuff more so than the meta is sort of enter that market that I’m surprised that Microsoft isn’t more present in it then than I believe. It’s not so much that it’s just an access problem, but that there are studies, bodies and participants who will help to make those things clearer. For my part, I mean, I try to avoid talking about where I work, but to some extent I am part of those groups. And that’s one of the things that I work toward resolving is making it clear to the people who are actually building safari. And to the extent that I can bug them about it, the people building Chrome, what it is that that I think that various sort of interests need to need to have served within the context of those things. So, you know, Google is all keen on making it so that you have this massively deep tool challenge for doing fancy graphics. And I despise that because I don’t I don’t use any tools.
Brandel Zachernuk: [00:50:52] I just use the text editors and I call my stuff using a belt like that. And so I sort of try to prop Apple up in front of that face and say, no, Apple believes this when it’s when it’s really me, and thankfully they do. But yeah, so so to the end of ownership being worked out, I think that there are actually places and people who are working on those things, and I encourage people to to to think about what to take a look at the output of those entities to to see the way in which their work product is resolving some of those questions. And if there are particular perspectives that need to be brought to bear against it, then considering actually trying to pipe up either by influencing the people who are basically part of it or actually jumping in on their own behalf in order to advocate for those positions, because there aren’t actually that many people around the table. And and so anybody who has constructive sort of feedback about what should happen with those things will probably be listened to irrespective of their sort of credentials and background, because there’s a lot of people don’t don’t know a lot about what they should be making.
Frode Hegland: [00:52:04] Right. Yeah, right on that on spot on. Do you all know about the Knowledge Navigator video from Apple back in the day? If you don’t? For those who may not remember, it’s absolute rubbish. It was a visionary piece, but it was all about the eye doing everything. You know, you speak and I have the rainfall in Brazil over the last year. It’s just. Anyway, it was visionary, which is the point where there was a useful vision as something entirely different. When it comes to this, I can so easily imagine our Knowledge Navigator VIDEO And it would be one of us going into our office or desk or whatever it is, sitting down, working with a flat document and then, oh, there is meeting time. This is pretty much what I wrote in the document. Sorry for repeating myself. I just realized and then something in the document is of richer value. They literally pull it up through something like this. It’s in the space. Do manipulations where that someone puts in, someone puts in and then it goes back in at the end. That in itself, because that knowledge object can be anything that we’re interested in.
Frode Hegland: [00:53:07] It can be a citation timeline, can be a knowledge graph. It can be all these good things. But if we can manage to do that round trip, it will be amazing. And if for our little future text lab, if we decide to add some of our projects like Brandel, please feel free to just add whatever you want in an article and I’ll put it on the front page, or you can do it yourself. You all have admin access. There’s no difference in access. Then if you want, I can get advisor’s official advisors to the team. Vint Cerf will be very easy because he believes in the core vision. Not so much the VR, but he accepts the problems. You know, we can have some hefty people into this, which will give us some sort of a voice and outside of someone watching this particular video right now today, you know, people won’t necessarily know that we’re not actually anybody substantial, but you if we believe in something, it’s not faking it til you make it. It is standing strong until you get something done right. Just made that up, by the way, that last sentence, Mark.
Mark Anderson: [00:54:11] Now, I was just I was just thinking, as you’re speaking and you were sort of describing, you know, what would have been our video and I think. And I immediately thought, Oh God, no, not another glass wall corner office, please, you know, as much. Rather, it was sort of coming from, I don’t know, the middle of the Pampas or something. And I think in recent conferences, I’ve spoken to someone who is on a balloon Wi-Fi relay from the middle of the Masai desert and somebody else who joined in a joined in a seminar from a car, which we discover because some of the background noise coming back and it transpired they were just doing it to see if it works and in fact, it did. Apart from the feedback, but I mean, what I take from that is this sort of thing that, you know, in a sense, well, if if we’re if we’re solving something that looks good set in a wheelchair in the C suite, I’m wondering if we’re doing the right thing. I mean, I don’t think that’s where we’re going, but I think it’s something to bear in mind and in the way we’re positioning it.
Mark Anderson: [00:55:08] I mean, the uplift we’re trying to give is everyone. I mean is to, you know, make text, still sing for us as a society. So I mean, to a certain extent, you know, in in our in our placing in our discussion of where these things happen or our assumption where these things happen, happening in nice, clean white, shiny sort of rooms is something to which I think we’re all prone and I think we should draw back from it. You know, I do. I much, I think, Well, how would I, you know, how would I do this in a disaster zone? Or how would I do this in somebody who doesn’t have full on 24 access to something? Because that’s, you know, a bit we just all too easily look past and I’m not suggesting that. That’s not to sort of find fault in anyone here. It’s just I think it’s a way in which sometimes we’re all a bit blindsided by our own thesis and to make stuff go. Rafael.
Rafael Nepô: [00:56:08] Yeah. So I watched the future mundane video that Brandel mentioned, and it was quite nice, and it reminded me of these two books that I shared both Supernormal by Jasper Morrison and the Fukushima and the design of Everyday Things by Dan Norman and all of these three things both the future mundane and these two books. They talk about the same things of daily objects, everyday things in our daily life average boring, mundane, you know, just the daily Basic Life, right? And I like to think about that a lot because if we kind of break down, you know, our our day to day activities, we usually do the basic things more often than we do specific things. That’s why they’re called specific things. So when we think about that text as well. I love to think about, you know, the foundations of text and how we can make that even better, because that’s what we do pretty much every single day. We read more than we write. We write more than we publish. We publish more than, you know, we’re so it goes into a funnel of specificity, right? So I think a lot of my interest in in has to do with the everyday. So if I’m reading something just a regular article on a regular website, I want to be able to extract things from it. And that’s not easily done. So why not? I mean, we have the capabilities and we have, you know, ways of doing things. And like Brandel mentioned, there are standards from the W3C that they have to approve things and implement them and put them in the pipeline to be developed to be, you know, in different browsers.
Rafael Nepô: [00:57:57] And then these big companies have to, you know, have to end up developing and putting in their platforms as well. So all of these things are kind of interconnected in this mesh of people and standards and programming and everything. So even something as simple as having an interaction in an everyday browser, in an everyday website. It’s it’s it’s complex. It goes through so many different hands that it’s kind of complicated. But that’s that’s where I would go towards because I see things like either VR or academia as things that are more specific. So a regular Joe or a regular Mary, you know, they use the web, but they’re not academics. And then they they they might consume some news here and there, but it’s not in VR. So it’s kind of like the the base equalizer of how can we argument text the most amount of people through the simplest means possible of where we can achieve. And I think everybody in in these sessions, I think we know, I think we know too much. That’s why we go into the specifics. So if we try, if we try to take a couple of steps back and try to argument things for for for basic basic consumption, I think that goes a long, long, long way to starting the snowball effect of making everything else better.
Frode Hegland: [00:59:31] Well, I get a thumbs up, I mean, I don’t mean that, I didn’t mean that I meant stand up. Ok.
Rafael Nepô: [00:59:36] Did you not like it?
Brandel Zachernuk: [00:59:38] I’d be happy. I’ll throw the thumbs up. Yeah, that’s a really good reminder and something that I’d love to comment on as well. Go for it. And yeah, so so the the sort of the aspect of the future mundane that what it is that every day sort of entails is a really important motivator for me. The reason why once I found virtual reality as a thing that was interesting to do, I immediately went to to text was because if you think about what it is that most people do with computers, most of the time it’s not solving petty crime. It’s in a very brief terms. The the beginning of that my word reality talk is that people. It’s obvious that that architectural visualization, tele surgery, all of these things are amazing for VR and future technologies. But in order to make the most impact on humanity, it needs to be focused on the simplest things that people do. So that’s that’s reading and writing. And even if you were going to get more, more specific, it’s still not super specific. It’s excel. I think I’ve mentioned that people say people estimate there are about 50 million programmers, but more like seven hundred and fifty million Excel users in the world.
Brandel Zachernuk: [01:01:01] And if you’re going to talk about just reading and writing or relating documents to each other, then then that that number rises easily into the billions. Unfortunately, 90 percent of people don’t know how to use control F. And so that means that the that’s that’s it’s routinely sort of repeated that that’s that seems to be about the appropriate figure. So it means that anybody trying to get expert tools has the odds stacked stacked against them. But I think that that the most transformative sort of capacity comes from being able to be cognizant of the sort of, to your point, Rafael, the technical and the technological wherewithal of those people in terms of what they have access to, but as well as the sort of the conceptual models that are going to be capable of contract. That said, what I want to work on is the future of of of those things. And that’s why I’ve chosen to have relatively obscure and arcane kind of peripherals as part of my my work set using eye trackers that you attach to the front of the screen using using hand trackers that are able to to identify your hand and 3D space.
Brandel Zachernuk: [01:02:13] Not because I think everybody will have them tomorrow, but because if I come up with a good enough reason, maybe everyone and yes, everyone will have them in 10 years. And so that’s why I work in those those areas and why I think that it’s important for the future. But I agree that that it’s essential and very valuable to go further. You’ve mentioned to the BBC and other places that your your vision of what author does is for a relatively sort of constrained place in terms of the kind of person who needs it and the kind of person who derives benefit from it. And I think that’s also completely fine. And in fact, one of the things that people say startup world is find a person with a problem and solve their problem because if you get one hundred people who say, Oh, I can see how this would be really useful for somebody, but not for me, then you just don’t have a solution for a person. And what you need is somebody who will walk over a broken glass for what you do and then you can abstract from there, but you have to solve a problem. So, yeah, that’s stuff.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:03:22] Um, I’d love to jump in here. Thank you. Brandel, so to cover a couple of points, starting with the mention event, and I think and I put this in chat, so I don’t really need to go into it too much, but that’s that’s another one of those invisible attributes is the network that Frode has is something that I think can be converted into other materials, right? Be it an audience or passive income to cover costs, et cetera. So I see the newsletter as a path of conversion on the plus one to everything, Raphael said. And. And. I was going to say about that, yeah. What I like, what attracts me to the text and the kind of the space that’s there is that it’s it’s small and free, like there’s a book called The Whale versus the reactor. I have some more I’ll pull it up, and it makes a comparison of technology and its inevitability, right? So on one side, you have nuclear, which seems inevitable, and if you go nuclear, it actually changes your government, it changes your structures. Nuclear means central maintenance, right? High risk, high reward. On the other side, you’ve got solar, which is decentralised, right? It may not be as efficient, but you can. You can do it on your own. So I think a VR is almost like nuclear, right? Like it requires a kind of centralization and bundle. Currently, currently, meaning currently in the next five years, whereas text is like solar, right? As a technology, we all own it and we can all manipulate with it.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:05:18] So I am really interested in where text fits in with VR and that space. But throw in another metaphor. I was thinking about this the other day. There are activities that we do that don’t mesh well with other activities when we’re climbing a mountain that is not the time to cook a gourmet meal. Right? And it will never be the time to cook a gourmet meal. Right. So you’ve got like climbing and cooking. Um, and and to to tie that into the what we’re talking about, in some ways, I see VR is like climbing where it might not be the place for word processing in the sense that we’re familiar with 2D word processing today. But it could be the place for complete data immersion and finding points, you know, and understanding the texture in a way that you couldn’t do in 2D. And then that gets ported into something if it needs to be processed word wise, right? You can do that in another modality in the kitchen, but it’ll be interesting to see how that works out, right? Like maybe it will be the place to do all these things, but it may just be natural to its material that you like. This is where I find stuff. This is where you make sense of it. And over and over here back in 2D land is where I. Format it in different modalities for the, you know, for for other people anyway. I had some more stuff, but I’m going to stop talking now.
Frode Hegland: [01:06:58] Ok. Right now, it’s because I’m going to talk now. So this is really, really horrible and difficult. This is probably the most important conversation this group has had so far. When I did, my expert interviews are showing reader and author this kind of stuff came up. And one of the worst comments I got, which was from someone praising the software to high heaven, is that people who really will succeed in academia just won’t need it. They will use later, can reference managers. They’ll be fine people who like me, who are more on the artistic side of the spectrum. It won’t help them enough to succeed in academia, and they won’t care enough to find the software. So that was basically a big shutting everything down. That was awful, but there is a great truth in that. Doug was only ever interested in augmenting pioneers. He was. He didn’t care about the average user. But at this point we have Donald Trump and we have Boris Johnson, not at the same time. And in America, you have Sleepy Joe better than Trump. But all our political leaders are complete idiots at the moment, right? And that must be because most people are idiots and include us respectfully in that we’re idiots in different areas. Right. When it comes to if we are truly going to save the world and not just play with our favorite toys, which is really shaming myself, we probably have to do what you guys have been saying, Adam and Brandel.
Frode Hegland: [01:08:25] We probably have to find that average person in this context and find out that one moment where they have a little bit of question about COVID or climate or whatever it is that we provide an environment that’s ready to jump in and say, this is the best interaction, you could possibly have to get a useful thing in your head about this. Right. Which is really, really hard, so basically. Yeah, it’s a complete different target user, it’s completely different psychology, but the worst part of this problem is if we were to do such a thing, this person wouldn’t want our stuff. Because it’s almost done in. They don’t know they have a problem. We all don’t know what we’re ignorant about when we’re ignorant about it rights. And I’m not going to say we’ll simply have an A.I. thing watching you in the background, saying, excuse me, you should consider. I think that’s a bit of a cop out. But yeah, let’s really consider who we really want to augment because it’s a very difficult choice.
Brandel Zachernuk: [01:09:36] And on on Alan’s point about whether there is the right right, right thing and that it’s sort of nuclear, I think one of the things that that sort of led with where he was talking about the way that after being in VR for a while, you start to see this computing as simply different. I think that that sort of points to a vision for what computing is that understands that it necessarily needs to be more encompassing than than all of the computing happening in a pixel grid like this. So, so you know, that’s that’s why if you talk to people who are in VR now or have been in VR for a while and are serious about it, they often use phrases like spatial computing to talk about what it is that they think that computing should consist of and certainly in the professional communities. I’m aware of that. They do that because because for me, I’m actually not interested in VR. I’m not I’m not in headset VR in the sense that it’s not the exclusive domain of what I think matters. I’ve got the projector, I’ve got the lights and the idea of being able to have a large environment where you have a lot of screen space, but also an ambient awareness of where people are pointing and stuff like that. I think that’s that’s a critical perspective that will be opened up by virtue of virtual reality becoming more mainstream. And so far as the the sensing and the display passing that that threshold, that means that it’s viable to understand and be able to use beyond the sort of the frustration levels that are that that that academics have had to struggle through through the, you know, the 80s, 90s notwithstanding today because it was really hard, it was sickening, it was low resolution, it was low refresh rate.
Brandel Zachernuk: [01:11:34] So it didn’t have enough of the appeal to be able to do that. Now that it is, you know, it does a few things. One, it is actually a prototyping platform for other experiments, for other things. So if you want to do much more lightweight glasses based, you know, every walk around in a whole day kind of augmented reality, we can’t do that right now in real life, but we absolutely can. In virtual reality, you can make a virtual reality world of real world scene and say, like, I’m on the street, this is what I’m doing. Oh, I got hit by a car. And so you can you can prototype. You can think about what it is that that future looks like now because the tools are good enough for being able to do that. Likewise, if you just want to be in a kitchen with a couple of screens, maybe a projector that’s able to kind of move around and stuff like that, you can also do that in virtual reality. So that’s why I think that it’s essential, but not because of the technology itself in and of itself, but because it gives rise to the perception of the flexibility that computing, I believe, must necessarily sort of be accompanied with as we start to realize that pixel grids in a single computer screen frame.
Frode Hegland: [01:12:44] So yes. And another interesting thing that actually questioned first in the successful, very, very successful franchise battlefield. It’s no Battlefield 2042. Can any of you tell me how to get more ammo for rockets, missiles and that kind of stuff? Neither can I. And I play it about half an hour every evening, most evenings. I haven’t figured that out. And I think that’s really, really relevant because I figured out a lot of other things. You know, I can customize my rifle. I can run around, shoot, fly a plane, whatever. The key thing is, there is a huge market out there for people who really invest time and effort and learning software tools and their gamers. Right. It is absolutely untapped, so is there a way that we could possibly say, Hey, gamers, this is basically your knowledge game, not gamification, that’s an entirely different yes.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:13:48] Now, sorry, I thought I was on mute knowledge game, yes,
Frode Hegland: [01:13:54] But not knowledge gaming, right? I mean, because I noticed even in 2D Battlefield with some of the good ones, you pick up a different rifle. It feels different, right? And the controls are a bit different. Is there something we can do? I mean, when I designed author, I first decided on an iPad, so it was iPad and a Bluetooth Apple keyboard, and I had it with that tiny little twelve south tripod. You’re probably most of you know what it means. So when I took a picture of that on a table, it was such an elegant work environment. I want to build a Montblanc pen. I want to build a piece of software that feels like a physical object of beauty. Right? That’s my personal thing. So I’m just wondering, can we build something that has such an appeal to gamers that all the little elegance is all the affordances? All of that just feels almost like a game, but you just happen to be in Wow. I can actually deal with my knowledge better that that is how we sell it, so to speak. Adam, Adam Adam.
Adam Wern: [01:15:09] I’ve been trying it out. You saw that library circle. I did a week ago or so. And I’ve been playing more with it for. Further back, I thought the Earth really was a bit yeah, a nice way of presenting things, but not as useful as having like the infinite canvas or zoomable user interface. But the more I step into that circle, it feels like my element. Actually standing in a 3D representation, even on the screen is very, very rich. And suddenly many of the problems you have with long lists you can if you watch a long list in perspective. You get a sense of it, do you get the sense of the length, even though it’s larger than the screen because it’s in perspective, you can see the whole thing and standing in a cylinder of your whole library and watching it all together without start and end of the library. Just looking around on the screen is very there is so much to gain from being in 3-D because we are in 3-D all the time. So in a sense and also the books are in 3-D, so I don’t think it’s a step towards some sort of. Entertaining or or or a visual icon, the only it’s a real for me, it’s much more real being in 3-D, being in a 3-D library, even though it’s just thumbnails in a circle around me instead of being on an Amazon page with book listings. It’s really, really feels. Good to be in there. And so I think it’s worth exploring it much more with a very open eye towards the because when I stand there, it feels right for me and I usually follow that instinct.
Brandel Zachernuk: [01:17:12] It’s super exciting, I’m really glad to hear that.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:17:15] That is awesome, yeah.
Adam Wern: [01:17:16] And also one thing the hands, when I try having OK, I like the kind of a laser pointer thing. The point in point where you can point to it, where things were far away, it’s useful in. But having seen your own hands there and taking things especially working close distance with things in the air, it feels so real to move those cubes and things or spray paint in 3D. And we’re making sculpture just before your eyes, and I think there is something for texture actually taking words and moving them aside and moving them around or combining things because it feels so real. And I only get that sense on paper. Working with the pen. And so this can be. Something very similar to paper or even better in many ways. Yeah. Oh.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:18:18] I love that. Yeah. Plus one on all that, I just got back on Oculus and updated everything and the the hand-tracking was. Such a delight. That is great and. One of the points I wanted to bring up to go back to. Um. I am. It. Completely behind. And I think the intuition is good there to think of these even the prototypes, while on one side, I want to solve particular granular problems, painful problems like the example in creative selection, where the only thing they were demoing at the end of the day, I mean, they did all this work, whatever, for this demo to present to Steve Jobs. And it’s literally just a single button, you know? But I love that. And that is how that’s how you do it in grown up world. But but for the for the VR stuff and for the the knowledge, yeah, I think approaching the. Approaching it as games and play is far more in the spirit of Doug Engelbart and the earlier pioneers. And I think that’s actually where we can get our innovation. So yeah, like. Where it becomes difficult is I want to see I want to solve real problems in the VR space, right? Like enterprise, like I want lists to be blown apart and find new possible affordances and interfaces, right? Because even. Yeah, yeah. Even seeing like your your health tracking and you see, you know, like. Just a full list of your of your metrics, and it’s meaningless to see it in list form, it doesn’t feel right. But on phone, that’s the only option that you really have. The gaming side is great because it even though it doesn’t solve a problem. It can solve a problem that a person might not even be fully aware of yet. Right? If I could pull in all the things that I found on Twitter over the course of a week and then start to just glue them together, you know, not not in a game sense of like winning a game, but a game sense and just a sandbox of playground. Um. That would be awesome. At some other things, but I am very forgetful today, so
Frode Hegland: [01:20:55] Right, I’m down, that’s what I do. I write them in the chaplain. I delete them. So question Brandel. Is it relatively easy today to share a 3D object with us as a group without having the work? Excuse me that the voice and all of that, because I’m thinking very often when I go into VR, I leave my normal computer on. Have a normal music on and I do things in there. It’s not separate. And if I go into immersed, for instance, which I both love and hate, I am working on my normal computer with my normal things, which is very good. But the example that Alan said, which I think is a great example, just a basic list, like if we could have an export from our WordPress sites so we could do the stuff we talked about many times. How difficult is it for us to be able to, let’s say, six seven eight people to log in to a thing and share that VR object experience? While we’re not there in any other sense, sorry for repeating myself, it’s hard for me to state the question properly.
Brandel Zachernuk: [01:22:02] No, no, that’s fair. So, you know, the substrate that sticks Google Docs together so we can we could all be in a Google Doc in VR together and use it in Oculus Quest, but that’s not special. Like you mentioned, I’m not aware of. So, so so in principle. But given that you can do that, there’s no reason why that can’t also facilitate the construction of some kind of shared thing. I’m not aware of. Maybe, maybe, maybe that workspace was a of workspaces or whatever that that may have the ability to do that. But I’m simply not aware of a of of an environment where people can create like that and and be co-present at the same time. You’ve got Gravity sketch, you’ve got tilt brush, Google abandoned TED thresholds now open source. I think so. I’m not sure how people get hold of it on Oculus Quest these days. But yeah, I’m not aware of multiplayer and those kinds of environments because I don’t think that people are aware of the sort of the transformative impact of having multiple people involved in making those things, especially perhaps Frodo.
Adam Wern: [01:23:16] Or are you looking for for a thing where you can watch the same object kind of a day thing, a document object or a collection without manipulating in in real time? Or do you mean where we could edit it or update it together without being there as avatars or anything?
Frode Hegland: [01:23:36] I think both, and I think Zoom is a good model. You know, one person shares a screen at a time, so we could have one person handing off control to another person. That would be OK in the beginning, but I’m making the assumption that Apple will announce a VR headset in roughly a year and Brandel you haven’t said anything on this. So this is purely for the record that this is my perspective. I may be wrong, but that is strongly what I feel because of Monterrey and other Apple innovations recently. So I think when they release, they’re going to rely on FaceTime. We will be in FaceTime, in VR. Clearly, I think, and it will be connected to all the other devices. So it will be you still keep your laptop or your phone or whatever, and then you do other things with your VR, AR glasses. So I think that is really important and useful for us to try to develop. I mean, if it’s expensive, maybe we if we can really clearly specify what we’re talking about, maybe we can get some funding for this where specifically Adam and Brandel, because you’re the most making person at the moment, you can have a thing you have made and you can share it with us in VR. We play with it. And then maybe for the rest of the conversation, we go back to 2D. But it for one of us to go in one at a time in a Firefox cobble together. Yes, it’s really nice for hobbyists, but to get it to the next level, this infrastructure is key, right?
Brandel Zachernuk: [01:25:06] Yeah, I think you can cast in Quest, certainly you can cast to a phone or a local TV and display devices, so I haven’t I haven’t tried to cast to my to my computer, but but that’s certainly an option in terms of getting other people at to debut of one person’s special stuff. So, so yeah, we we can I can definitely take a look at that. My my, my goal this year, one of the things I’m trying to figure out how to do and how, how I can not be obliged to do all of the learning to make it happen is is to get a good boilerplate. So Adam, I’m not sure if you’ve used my extra boilerplate, but it’s the basis for all of my experiments. But what I want to do is get a good multiplayer boilerplate so that I can can, just, as you say, free to spin up any, any dumb thing that I want to have multiple people. And that slow mirror thing that I’ve been doing is sort of toward that end, being able to kind of play multiple hand figures with multiple tracks of data.
Adam Wern: [01:26:16] Yeah, I’m looking into that right now how to make, I think, going just by a web socket and not doing the whole web or whatever. There are PC thing, but just be a. Sending that mandate and head data over could be a first step, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Brandel Zachernuk: [01:26:40] Then you at least get back and if you because you can use any other audio channel, things like we could actually be on a zoom for audio and have headphones that aren’t in the quest and then would at least be able to get that motion data. Yeah, I’d be totally on board with that. That would be really interesting. Yeah, because because yeah, I think you’re right, Frodo, that that should be easy and that that would be really valuable and transformative to be able to kind of prototype with that environment and have multiple people kind of observe it at the same time. I’m not aware of a of a of a commercially or otherwise available solution at this point, nor am I aware of other people recognizing the need for it sufficient to the point where it’ll land and anytime soon. Just deeply, deeply disappointing. But I’m very, very relieved and glad to see you’re at it at a mature.
Adam Wern: [01:27:31] Yeah, I mean, I think we could bolt something together here having a small server that pings our activities together. And also if it’s few use or I think we could, we don’t need a very fancy structures for having like multicast. Yeah, yeah. And editing and editing things together. It could be like old school multiplayer where you could step on other’s toes and there is no good merging, but you just see where they work and don’t work at the same place at the same time. And that could be good enough. Yeah, yeah, I can. Like in real life, you can’t you can’t just step into someone’s base and fix a dinner. They will be angry and they they do their thing and you’ll see that they work there very clearly because they occupied that physical space. You can take a step back and work on other things. So it’s similar to a kitchen with VR.
Brandel Zachernuk: [01:28:31] Yeah, yeah. I don’t know if everybody saw a slow mirror, but this. That’s the YouTube video that I linked last week, but you can use it yourself and sort of playback, but also save those files such that you can open them in Blender, which is quite fun for being able to kind of do that. And it useful for understanding what might be transmittable in order to to be able to get somebody else’s live playback. Live performance playback remotely because it shows what the data manifest needs to be. It’s just a bunch of numbers which that it’s the numbers on how to rehydrate it.
Mark Anderson: [01:29:05] Do most of these things? You’re pacing Brandel. Do they need chrome or will they work in Safari?
Brandel Zachernuk: [01:29:11] So love their quest.
Mark Anderson: [01:29:14] Oh, I see.
Brandel Zachernuk: [01:29:17] It’s so I mean, if you if you get somebody’s performance file, then you don’t think either you should be able to just click on a disk and then open it up and see it. Similar to that, put it in sketch. So, so the end result is something that looks like this, which you should be able to see in safari or whatever is missing here is just a performance summary and moving their hands. My hands around. Ok. But you get that that kind of data such that you can kind of. So the vision for that is once I know, once I knew how to do that, save record load, play it, play out of spacial, remove play.
Mark Anderson: [01:29:55] Every time I see I see this, I was think that thing that in principle area where the guy sort of taking over the chips, going on on the emplacement and he says, you know, just getting my hands. But the reason I put my hand, I was just, I just in passing. It looks back right now when I was listening to and talking about lists and being able to sort of decompose some and or in a sense, being able to have a tactile interaction with their information. And this speaks this immediately speaks back to me, to the community I’ve been in it and knowledge tools which people know things that tinderbox. And one of the things is people love. There are the open ended maps, you know, because if you’ve only ever known a graph, make a mind map. It’s quite liberating. But the the and the explanation I sort of always give to people is, well, think of it like a jigsaw. You know you you may you may have the picture, you may not. You have box. You probably got all the pieces. You may not well, you tip out the pieces and you start sorting, you know, probably sort them. The pictures are on top kind of thing and the patterns emerge. And I and I and and that sort of behavior seems quite natural and it’s interesting a lot of people in Leicester never use the jigsaw.
Mark Anderson: [01:31:09] At that point, the metaphor works quite strongly for them, and they can map the entire thing. And I I can already see that sort of behaviour of sense making. Within a 3D space, and it doesn’t really matter, particularly what the objects are, because the way that you will effectively construct your workspace, the objects that you use will have a meaning for you. You know, that’s an implementation problem. But but you know, I can I can see that working. But this ability, therefore it frees what it frees this up to do is to do the bit that we still find hard to simulate programmatically, which is the the associative linking that we do seemingly rather well and haven’t yet sort of worked out into algorithmic terms. So I find that I find it a really another strong reason because right now, as you say that although the game is the interesting part of what people see at the moment, it’s the ability to interact with the information, the text, the ideas that I think is the real growth space in due course without, you know, which doesn’t undermine the recreational value. But I just think the societal uplift that will get out of there will be more in these other features.
Frode Hegland: [01:32:32] Right. So on the website, I’ve added on the front page at the bottom there, it says VR resources and then you can go by by Brandel and by Adam. We haven’t done anything by you yet, Adam, but it’s there ready for you to be tagged. So just to by Adam as one word, and it’ll be the same you. And I also have a as you can see in the chat, I link to what Brandel just said. So whenever you’re in an Oculus, just click and go. So then I have the bigger issue, which is what I wrote above and only just now entered. So what we are actually inventing is not a metaverse that is purely a branding term. We are reinventing the internet. That is what we’re doing, right? Because what? What is what is internet? Internet is a network of networks, right? That is what we’re doing. So I’m wondering if this is something I should more aggressively talk to vent about his perspective, not just for headset VR, but as Brandel points out, really? Well, this is a multiple way of having multiple dimensions. That’s just one of it. And if we can, then maybe I don’t know about Vue spec. No, no. Ok, let me get this very, very clear to my very dear friend, Marc Marc. We have to get you an Oculus.
Brandel Zachernuk: [01:33:51] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, you have you at least have to try it, I mean,
Mark Anderson: [01:33:55] I think there are practical issues, but but
Frode Hegland: [01:33:59] We’ll solve the practical issues because you’re a super clever person and I love you dearly. But when it comes to the emotion of this, it’s like a ten year old talking about sex. Right, and that’s a year ago, so I’m not being arrogant by saying that, you know, it’s just a prescription.
Mark Anderson: [01:34:15] Mine. Oh, I’m just I’m about plus two and a half, so I basically, you know, middle aged reading distance degradation that’s used to have in my young seem lost their 2020 eyesight. Certainly that’s settled. But now I’m a bit of a stigmatism. But nothing, nothing. Nothing expensive, thankfully.
Brandel Zachernuk: [01:34:36] Yeah, that’s good. So you can put four glasses inside, but you can also get prescription drug pens as well. So so in practical terms, if that if those are the issues, then that’s not it.
Frode Hegland: [01:34:48] That’s something to look at. I’m researching that mark. I’m not sure what I’m going to do, but what I’m what I’m saying is like, Adam pointed out, sitting down and being moved in VR is more nauseous than yourself moving in VR. All these different things that you just I. No, no, no,
Brandel Zachernuk: [01:35:08] I don’t I don’t see much of a future part. I think, you know, a Half-Life Alyx, you know, the top rated absolutely hands down best sort of entertainment experience in VR by default has Blink Teleport, which is where you you move by, by, by instantaneously moving from one location to another of your own choosing, and you’re able to free move to the extent that your space provides for you in that. But you don’t. You never moved. And they have the options there, but they should come with flashing warning signs for how sickening it is, and I don’t think that will ever go away. Frankly, I think I think the room scale VR is the answer to that where you have traversable spaces that you’re able to slide that over effectively for it through blinking to one place, to another to another. I mean, there are some, some there’s some really interesting work wisdom draft where if you if you constrain the effective field of view for a person while they’re actually locomotive, then it reduces the amount of motion sickness. But I think, yeah, it’s such a deep problem because of how tightly wired our vestibular apparatus are to our to our visual motor system that we effectively won’t get a solution to it that I can imagine until we can do crazy gross things to stimulating, directly stimulating parts of our our nervous system in ways that we’re not comfortable with today.
Frode Hegland: [01:36:33] Yeah. And that’s the kind of things that we’re learning as a community that you just until you’re there, you just don’t feel it. Adam.
Adam Wern: [01:36:41] Oh, that is why I think it’s good. A good starting place is kind of doing the sphere around you thing. Yeah. And and that has other benefits as well, because it translates pretty well to both AR and VR. You can step into the VR world completely with whatever background you want, but also at some point, if we have heads up display or or area glasses or anything we could like, overlay that sphere in the real world and and have us quite similar interface. And that also works quite well on the on the flat screen as well, where you don’t have to navigate far and walk away, just zoom around or look around. That is. So I think it’s a good starting point to do that kind of near near interaction.
Frode Hegland: [01:37:32] Oh, absolutely, Adam. I have to go in a few minutes. I have to pick up the family. It’s a bit cold here. I see you have your hand up again, Mark. But yeah, very quickly.
Mark Anderson: [01:37:42] Just to explain, the reason I use the term view spent was to make an angle Barton sort of take on this. What I really was thinking of is that picture where it’s Tim Bale and Vint Cerf and one saying I didn’t invent the internet. I said I didn’t invent the web. I mean, for a lot of people today, the web is the internet, and the only distinction I was really making was, I get I get where you’re going. I just I was perhaps just being slightly pedantic in that. So it’s valid, but it’s it’s what it’s doing is it’s opening up another aspect. So it all sits atop the internet. So it’s it’s more that it’s an, you know, you could say it’s an enhancement. I mean, you know, whether we want to call it new and different or
Frode Hegland: [01:38:24] I would call it much more. I think we’re
Mark Anderson: [01:38:26] All on the same page.
Frode Hegland: [01:38:28] I think we are and I don’t think anybody is trying to sell anyone on anything. It’s just it seems the shift for me is this like the platonic ideal? Or you could call it the natural world. I think it’s much more natural in VR. But I also completely agree with Adam’s set down. You know, when I’m in VR, when I’m doing work, unless I’m building a ship, I don’t want to walk around. I want to set. I want to have my normal interactions with my laptop and screen because that’s what the body is for. Yes, things up here. So having the spherical thing completely agree. Yeah, it makes absolute so much sense.
Adam Wern: [01:39:04] All right. But standing, I really feel liberated by standing in a spot, working with my yeah, leaning a bit, working with my hands a bit more freely. I think I don’t think we should constrain it to sitting, but not just moving around in worlds too much, much I think standing, it’s over and I think it’s good for us as well. I really felt that it felt liberating working with a computer and not staring at a small phone or sitting in front of a computer. I felt that liberating, standing up and moving.
Frode Hegland: [01:39:41] Oh yeah, I agree with you, Adam, both for depending on what kind of work and this is what we really have to experience. But also, of course, you know, like the health games, we have to do this stuff. Hang on there in Wimbledon already just off the tip. Sorry.
Mark Anderson: [01:40:05] I’ll just say I remember the first time I managed to get a really long telephone cord because I do find it easier to concentrate on the call standing up. I used to be able to when I found I could buy them from the states where you have this phone, where you can walk half way through the house on the way before we had wireless phones. That’s such a liberating thing. Plus, the only place in my house where there seems to be no cell phone reception is that at my desk.
Frode Hegland: [01:40:30] Bizarrely, the guys I got to go, I’m going to let this run you. I want to spend another couple of minutes.
Mark Anderson: [01:40:41] We better let him get it.
Frode Hegland: [01:40:44] Oh, hang on. Edgar says he wants to use the bus. So OK, I’ll come down a little bit. That’s the fun thing about that age.
Mark Anderson: [01:40:53] Things that you’ve trained him well.
Peter Wasilko: [01:40:56] Well.
Frode Hegland: [01:40:58] I think his mother trained him extremely well with, Oh. What do you want for dinner? Well, what do we have? Right, OK. That’s right. It’s not pizza, pasta. Let’s go out.
Mark Anderson: [01:41:12] That’s right. That’s.
Frode Hegland: [01:41:15] Right, so, yeah, please do some bio stuff on the website, I can’t remember if you all have log ins, you should. It’s so, so many issues. Let me just say.
Peter Wasilko: [01:41:30] The email, the login passwords to us or how does that work?
Frode Hegland: [01:41:37] It’s the system should have done that. Oh, Brandel, I don’t think I know. Do you not have? It’s so awful. There’s some kind of a bug in WordPress. When I try to make a new user, it’s and I type in, I suppose, the initial password that says they don’t match
Mark Anderson: [01:42:02] This is how you can tell it was written by a human.
Frode Hegland: [01:42:06] So actually, Peter, you should have been email. They did not get an email and you mark
Mark Anderson: [01:42:13] The short check. Just just just just this recently. Minutes ago? No.
Peter Wasilko: [01:42:22] What was the sending address?
Frode Hegland: [01:42:25] Sometimes I’ll think, oh, OK, Brandel, check if you got it, because then you’ll be able to say the sending address. Adam, you are not in either, I think, yeah, I’m in. Really? Yep.
Brandel Zachernuk: [01:42:41] Cool. No, it’s it’s it’s word. Oh yeah. Yeah, you probably WordPress. That future tech lab. And it went to my promotions folder in Gmail. Ok.
Mark Anderson: [01:42:52] The wood press at. 11, what we do know came a few days ago, it’s probably in my eye. I’ll get right on that pile.
Brandel Zachernuk: [01:43:12] Yeah. Cool. No, thank you, I’ll put a put something because that is another frustration with my earlier too long to type. I do it, but I do it grudgingly. Or if you you can actually attach you enable developer mode on your Oculus and you can enable inspection in chrome remote inspection with a USB cable attached so that then you can inspect the page. It’s really essential for doing any debugging and things like that, but also very useful for being able to then just type in the URLs on your computer to be able to put in. But you can also connect on Bluetooth keyboards these days as well, which is pretty neat.
Frode Hegland: [01:43:48] Oh, that’s interesting.
Mark Anderson: [01:43:50] Also, I’m very happy to put it also pointed to the data set that all the current public. Yes. Yes, it’s a data set that I gave to Adam. Also Brandel. If you want that, I have more information because I did things like we actually gendered all the authors because we were we were trying to report on, you know, destroy some, debunk some myths about things. But obviously things like that and data sets are a tad careful about who I share with because although it done with the best of intent and I think fairly accurately, it’s the kind of thing that can get, you know, escalate out of hand. Absolutely.
Brandel Zachernuk: [01:44:27] In this world. Oh, this is not about your books that you’re Oh, no,
Mark Anderson: [01:44:31] No, no, this is sorry. This was about the data set. So the stuff that Adam did previously, those JavaScript visualizations. So basically, I manually gone and taken what was in the ACM DLC for the Hypertext Conference, which wrote about 30 years. And what I’ve done is I’ve taken, I’ve abstracted all the anomalies and all the authors. I have done all all the in conference citations because it’s not accurate within, you know, because basically what what the what the ACM has got and that’s not, you know, to speak ill of it. They have got 30 years of the best the OCR could provide, and it’s a bit flaky at the beginning, and it’s not actually that great towards the end, to be honest. So what I’ve done is taken that and then I’ve done it all in tinderbox that it happens, but it doesn’t need to be done there, done that. I’ve also got all the so I’ve got all the authors as individuals, I’ve got all the key author keywords, which are interesting it over, I think 60 percent and nonce terms, they occur once. Well, that tells us that humans are pretty bad at key wording.
Frode Hegland: [01:45:39] So now I do have to go and that dataset is really cool and useful. So that has to be shared. Please put something on the website and a discussion thing about that mark so that we kind of go via that. If you want
Mark Anderson: [01:45:53] To, you know, I’ll it. I’ll email Brandel Brandel. Some slightly better, better copy of it because a bit more data so good.
Frode Hegland: [01:46:02] And then also, I’m about to put a sentence into chat here. Tell me if you agree with the sentence. So we have agreed to work on a quote unquote manifesto of access for how VR environments and objects should be transportable and shareable. Is that right? Because if we work on a little document like that, then I can send it to Vint and others and say, we think this is important. We are working on aspects of this and then we can sign up some really interesting people to be our advisors, to actually be our advisors and to lend their weight to this.
Mark Anderson: [01:46:38] Yeah. I didn’t. In passing a word to leave her in there, if it isn’t, there is internet because what we’re doing is we’re except if in doing this, we’re expanding the ability of the existing system, which I think is something that
Frode Hegland: [01:46:54] I completely agree. I’ve added it. Brandel, Adam and Peter, do you feel comfortable that we should try to write something like that? Or don’t you think it’s useful?
Brandel Zachernuk: [01:47:02] No, I think it’s useful. You said the environment as in virtual environment.
Frode Hegland: [01:47:08] I just put it in chat so we can edit that sentence together if you want.
Brandel Zachernuk: [01:47:18] Yeah. So rather than the environment, I may lean more towards spatial or or multidimensional. Just because it’s, you know, virtual reality at this point refers to headset VR. Back in the day, there was such thing as fish tank VR and various other kind of manifestations, caves and. And I don’t think that they died for for reasons that are inevitable. I think that that could come back on the scene. And I think that that what I like is dimensions and human scale and all of those kinds of things. So so, so changing that to, yeah, spatial is good. Objects to be transportable and shareable by the yeah. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think I think that’s
Frode Hegland: [01:48:09] So for those sorry.
Brandel Zachernuk: [01:48:12] One thing, as you were talking about about the the web, you said that we we weren’t making the metaverse, but we were talking about something. We’re actually trying to make an internet for rich worlds. I think that the the fact that what we are, what we are considering is a little bit more opinionated than that is a useful point in our IT to consider in terms of what that means. The discussion should be should be centred around and if it’s to do with the capacity for information processing or relating text to itself or each other, then those are those are meaningful sort of places to plug in there as well. Because the web site is a platform that has so few opinions about what it is and what it’s for, that it means that it’s very difficult. You know, it’s like I’ve talked to a bunch of people about what is better word processing, and they’ve all concluded that because word processing sort of facilitates so many different tasks, they can’t see a way for it to be better. That means they’re lacking in some measure of imagination, and maybe I should get better friends. But the broader point is that until you start talking about a more specific set of writing, then it’s difficult to envision a better set of tools. If you’re talking about screenwriting, then final draft does a good job. Scrivener does a reasonable job, as I understand for fiction and some other things. But, but yeah, so like if we can, we can winnow that down to something that’s a little bit more specific to what we really we really care about. Then I think that that’s all the more meaningful and we’ll be all the more powerful to the to the advisors and the mentors who are aware of the value and benefit that this comes from that specificity. You know, the venture capitalists are replete with are awash with people who are reinventing X writ large rather than the really specific thing that they ought to be actually after. So, yeah,
Frode Hegland: [01:50:01] I think that is great and very useful. So if you can all consider over the weekend writing something and just put it in a discussion blog thing, we can then spend a few minutes on Monday, maybe putting it into a singular piece and then we can link to your original pieces if they are longer than what we have in the brief piece. Then we have a bit of a mission statement because I think the object that goes into this that we’re talking about could be if we talk about a multidimensional graph. I mean, remember, the web was initially a phone catalog, right? So if we talk about something as specific as you’re saying, here is a new way to view lists and relationships, keep it really specific and almost boring, and then explain how it can go into many things. So it’s not just vague talk. Does that make sense? Yes. Ok. My family is on the bus. Very traditional, but it is multidimensional. This is wonderful. I look forward to Monday. Bye, guys.
Brandel Zachernuk: [01:51:08] Thanks, everybody. Fun.
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