Video: https://youtu.be/vaurwpNz04Y
Chat log: https://futuretextlab.info/2022/01/18/17-jan-2022/
Alan Laidlaw: [00:01:05] Hello. Sorry, I couldn’t get the record, except acknowledgement before I could unmute. That’s funny.
Frode Hegland: [00:01:15] Oh yeah. I’ll pause for a bit, actually and not rehash so.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:01:21] Ok, great. So I was I was thinking about why I hadn’t read the email exchanges or any of your emails. Sadly, I mean, I’ll read some of them and I’ll read them in skin. But what’s my hesitation? So many hands up with reading, and it made me think of Dorian Taylor’s article agile as trauma. And it made me think that that actually, in some ways, reading is. Kind of like trauma or could be could be framed that way. When you ask someone to read something that you wrote in some times you are asking them to put more effort in than you put in to writing it. And this is where I think something like slack or async channels become really valuable, and maybe it hasn’t been expressed. But that mode is understood to be conversation rather than right. All right. So when you’re talking and using channels, it’s like just go for what is being imagines, come out of my mouth. But an email format, it feels like, hey, here’s the thing and the manifesto, perhaps specifically, here’s a thing that has been composed now. I must deconstruct my thoughts on the have represented. You know, there’s just a whole lot going on there to an unspoken request. So.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:02:49] A guessing maybe. All Adam was saying there is just like or what I think I should say is these things can be might be better suited to be worked out in a more conversational channel like the one we have right now or something that’s async and then can can lead to something that you can ask other people to to read and reflect on, right? But yeah, that’s that’s a that’s what I wanted to share there. I think it’s also why I haven’t read so much of the material that’s come out of this group. You know, the book and it’s a it’s a thing to think about and perhaps some of my. Devil’s advocate devil’s advocacy when it comes to the speaker series is that I’m working my way through Barbara Trevaskis book and I adore it, but I still put it down at times and let it kind of the concept sink in and I’ll pick it back up in a month or two. You know? I’m not going to read a full transcript of of what these talks are about, and I know that’s not the point. The point is to have something in the archives. But those are. Those are the issues I want to bring.
Frode Hegland: [00:04:13] Ok. I think I see many hands, but this is really important. First, a detail you all are you happy with the invitation email? Yeah. Ok. Where’s that? I I think I invited you, I’m not sure I should have. And the other point is. Hang on, let’s just. Actually, Peter, Peter, please go ahead.
Peter Wasilko: [00:04:38] Ok. I wanted to note just slightly before when Alan was talking that his comment about thinking about ways that we can be more effectively develop and code together and not email really resonated with me. And I also want to note that I’ve been thinking about responding to your email vis a vis the legal issues, but it didn’t seem to me that email was the right forum, and I wanted to be somewhere between the formality of a formal journal piece and the informality of an email piece. And I’m still not sure exactly how to balance that. But the response should probably come as an author document with its own little visual media attached so that it could get slotted into the journal at a later point. With respect to law, a key consideration is that ownership isn’t an all or nothing thing. The greatest invention in the area of intellectual property was the notion of being able to break up and fragment right along a bunch of different dimensions so that you can have distinct rights for reproduction reproduction in different media. You can have separate rights for building, follow on derivative works, and you can parcel out those packages of rights and subdivide them and sell them off in different chunks, either exclusively or not exclusively. So there’s so much that you can do once you realize that you’re not dealing with a single atomic, right? But really a spectrum of options. And that’s why I find the Creative Commons licensing approach be particularly appealing because it does break out those different right elements as opposed to the monolithic licenses that are used in the open source community.
Frode Hegland: [00:06:23] Interesting. On the invitation, you’re all OK with that invitation, because then I’ll just send it. I should have sent that last week, but. One, two, three.
Mark Anderson: [00:06:41] Yeah, we’re seeing for those who have not seen it, I don’t think there’s anything controversial. It is just basically the people asking to come to Bob Rose.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:06:48] Okay, yeah. By the way. Ok, good.
Frode Hegland: [00:06:52] Oh, Brandel is here. Good to see you. Relevant things. Mark has something and then just a couple of quick things.
Mark Anderson: [00:07:05] Throw in. Just I was thinking another another factor that I mentioned Fred, which is entirely due to our sort of global settings and quite apart from quite apart from our time zones, is the fact that especially at the end of the week, if we do something and sort of send something out after it, that’s the beginning of the weekend, which means different things to different people. But it may. What that may effectively mean is that it’s going to get answered on Monday, earliest and possibly on Monday in a different time zone. And that’s kind of that’s really difficult when you’re on the sending end because you sent it with the thought that, yes, really in reality. I mean, that’s just something I’m I’m reminding myself as much as anyone that know that that sort of thing. And I think I put up the article. So I put that back in for Brandel. Allan mentioned a guy called Dorian Taylor.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:08:09] That was the correct one. It was did I throw the link into the air about the four channel approach that I lost? It looks like I skipped that.
Mark Anderson: [00:08:16] Sorry, was that the wrong one that I put in?
Alan Laidlaw: [00:08:18] No, no. You’re right, you’re right.
Mark Anderson: [00:08:20] And I think I I sort of my eyes fell on the collaboration is yet more trauma. I thought, Yeah, hey. But one thing I I just sort of by way of partial summary of a of something that Fred and I kick back and forwards is I was trying to work out how to how to sort of slot in the things that we can practically do into the umbrella of the sort of higher level aim that we have. I think I’m probably of the camp that I though I I think we are effectively making manifest. I know that word is sort of potentially toxic. And also it may also sometimes apply a bit more involvement than it’s meant. So but I think we’ve we’ve we’ve crested that rise, so we’ll leave that alone. But I was having an it’s an interesting sort of chicken egg argument with with Fred about the fact that so we’re talking about, you know, how how we exchange in order to own something and move it across. You need to have something. And I might just the perspective I was coming from, we’re different that I sort of think, Oh, well, okay, do we actually know how these things are defined, which sort of means in terms of their data format in a fairly lucid way because I’m assuming at the moment that pretty much every big player in the field is probably doing it differently just because no one told them they had to do it a certain way and they all have their their will have their side different aims.
Mark Anderson: [00:09:52] But that’s one of the things that will constrain effectively the the implicit matter format or sort of VR matter like the visual matter we would give for text kind of thing. I think we’re working towards because to a certain extent that that that’s where it hits, that’s where it hits reality. If the thing I’ve defined. You can’t understand. Then no one knows anything because it’s not going. And that might sound flippant. I don’t mean it that way. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t. But I also totally. It doesn’t mean the opposite, as it may appear that the data is anything that matters. I was just thinking about. It’s this subtle interplay between the tools and the data, which which got me thinking about well, as well as exploring the some of the environments which, you know, Fred’s been getting into and actually shared with me earlier, which is really interesting was, well, what sort of. What sort of data, to wit, TED textual data, because we are the future of text, can we and should we be playing around with to expose some of these edges? So when it comes to me naturally, because I think that’s one thing I’m quite happy doing is sort of digging up globs of of information and getting them into a stand.
Mark Anderson: [00:11:22] My my, my, I suppose my task to myself is that I want to give something that they can use without breaking everything, which is not much data as you come to it in the first place. So they use one of the useful things I can do here. I may not be able to do anything with the data myself, but I hopefully I can give somebody something. They can tell you it so. To wit, today I found an amazing database basically compiled to stop people desecrating war graves. But it’s every naval ship that’s been sunk since, I think fifteen hundred up to the current day. So massive timespan really, really got. You can imagine around about nineteen forty somewhere it gets a bit heavy and there’ll be lots of events and it’s all it’s all in locations. So there are reasons, things. So we’ve got temporal stuff. We’ve got Latin long and we’ve got other things, and I thought that might be interesting to explore. And also, it’s sufficiently so far from what any of us do that it gets us out of worrying about whether the point is not, do I understand it? But when I look at this, can I make sense? And it sort of speaks to me as exactly the kind of thing I imagine that VR might offer as something to do.
Mark Anderson: [00:12:31] Otherwise, I can look at a table that comes out of a spreadsheet. I might be able to make a graph, and if I’m really lucky, I might be able to make an interactive graph. And the other, the other. And then I’ll show up. The other thing that came to me from that is that this to me now speaks really strongly of something that Freud spoken eloquently of in the past, which is sort of living documents. The data might not be in the document. Maybe the data might be referenced from the document, but in a sense, so I might try and say, Oh, look, I can look at the data underneath this and I can look at it in all these ways. And so part of that from the from me, for instance, growing data as well is what’s there enough are there are the things that are needed if I want to play with a table, you know, an Excel spreadsheet in 3D. Are there more things are actually needed or not? And I don’t know. And again, so I just thought that’s another thing that we could usefully do, and I willingly offer myself up to sort of do some slave work on the data for that give over to frame.
Frode Hegland: [00:13:33] Ok, so earlier Alan was saying the long emails or the articles, why should he read it? I’m paraphrasing you, Alan, because I think that is actually a central issue of text, right? If you are talking about Wittgenstein or somebody famous and an authority, yes, you should invest the time and effort. But if you’re talking about a colleague, why in the world should you do that? I think that’s really, really important. I think I mean, I just submitted my thesis, which is, you know, many words and all of that. It’s a ridiculous document. It is intended only to show other people that I can do stuff right. If I was going to make that useful, I would have to make it in many smaller bits and make it more hyperlink than all of that stuff. So that is why I don’t know. Brandel Did you see the email that Adam replied to me this weekend?
Brandel Zachernuk : [00:14:26] Yes. And I read the parts of the amount of special, but it has disappeared at such point as I had managed to get the time together to read the whole thing. Yes, I saw the thread and I read, I read everything in the thread.
Frode Hegland: [00:14:41] I’m going to go off recording for a bit so we can discuss how kind of our workings in private. So that was a bit of housekeeping, and now we’re back on, Alan wanted to talk about how he says as we started a good rhythm for us to to move forward.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:15:02] Oh yes, sure. And but does anybody else? There’s been some hands up that have gone down.
Mark Anderson: [00:15:12] It’s, you know, it doesn’t need to be sequential. You crack on and pick up the earlier point and then we’ll pick up the rhythm.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:15:16] All right. Thank you, Mark. You’re a gentleman and a scholar or one or the other in whatever order. Yeah, I was thinking about the, uh, the nature of our conversations and the difficulty it is. That’s understandable to sort of pinpoint what it is that we’re about. And so an orthogonal approach to that might be to elect kind of mascots or rallying points that we can say, yes, this is one thing that we really love. We identify with this. We want more of this. And so in that vein, like, for instance, the book Creative Selection with Ken, I can’t remember his last name. Cassandra, thank you. Evokes a lot of you know. I think the feeling of the group, the idea of the value of quick demos, quick impact, and that you can’t solve all of the problems all at once. So so you actually I even think it would be worth going through, and I’ve been highlighting parts of it that are like, Hey, here’s a lesson, here’s a separate lesson. So we could spend more time discussing what goes into a demo, as well as the meta of a demo, as well as coming up with stories and what good things would be to either crystal ball or or it truly build. And the final point about that was. On the other side, on the on the other end of the spectrum. There’s the VR, which in my mind’s eye and I mentioned this in the email to me, VR and climate change are like, they’re so close together in my head, which I know sounds absurd, but they’re both inevitable. They’re intertwined. We don’t know what direction they’re going to go. We don’t know how it’s going to land, but we know it’s going to happen. And so. It limits a lot of what we can do, like we can’t say, I think climate change is going to do this and therefore we need to do this. It’s very like I feel helpless when I’m sure we all do. When it comes to climate change, what we can do is talk about it, come up with different ways to to break it down. Yeah, that’s
Frode Hegland: [00:17:31] Ok. Sorry, Mark. And Peter, I just have to jump in there. Two of my closest friends, one was Doug. One Vince, right? And this is not me saying, Oh, brag brag. I was very lucky to get to know Doug and hence meant they could not have afforded to think like that. That’s right, when the internet happened, there was a bunch of students making it there were always expecting the adults in the room. They never appeared. All right. Doug always talked about himself as this farm boy from Oregon, that’s going to be a lot of stuff with Apple and Oculus and all these fancy things are meant to. Fair enough. But we have an absolute obligation to do this because don’t forget that the only people who will do stuff is people. We are people, right? It isn’t out of our control. Of course, we have almost no say in this at all. But if we look at jumping five years ahead and looking back, we could have a really good discussion of what we should have done and what we should have done. We all agree in this group we need to write statements to clarify and inspire. So by the way, Brandel this new version of the article, please read it and I would love for you to contribute pieces of specific we need to do this. That would be amazing. And also, yes, we need to do demos. We need to. At this point, I think it’s 50 50 demo and politics. The politics of it is to inspire and warn and get lots of famous people to say, Holy Moly, VR is going to take over our lives. We all need to do blah blah blah and the blah blah blah is going to dialogue. We’re holding up. That’s all. I hope you’re not too offended by me saying, Alan. I think we have more power. No, no, no.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:19:09] I. I love that, and I have something to add to that, but I’ll throw it in, chat everybody else. Go ahead.
Frode Hegland: [00:19:15] Yeah. Mark, sorry. And then Peter. Sorry, guys.
Mark Anderson: [00:19:18] Ok. Time to write things down because of course, we loop around nicely. I was going to say I think about the journal and something that’s always struck. I was never lucky enough to meet Doug, but something there was sort of an interesting and I thought underwritten part of the story was the journal. Because can you look at the NHLS journal now? No, you can’t. Yes, you can write well, you have
Frode Hegland: [00:19:44] The original hardware. That’s an important thing. He kept it going to the very end. I think it’s still available, but it hasn’t been ported, so your point is still very important.
Mark Anderson: [00:19:53] So one of the interesting things that we’re doing is just as a sort of matter activity almost without intending to. That’s to be unkind to actually defrayed. He’s made an awful lot of the running in terms of this, but it is is the recording of what we’re going along. It’s fascinating to me because we are without even without intending. We are sort of we’re going back to this in recreating the journal and part of the thing, you know, I find myself thinking, OK, so what needs, you know, what needs to be in the journal? How is it useful? And we’ve had these conversations, for instance, about things like the degree of needing transcript or the degree of fraternity. You know, how much effort is, is it actually worthwhile spending just saying, Well, we can store everything doesn’t necessarily help us find stuff. We just end up with more stuff. So that’s just one point at the very beginning of this conversation. You’re talking about the conversation that I happen to sit in with you and Dave and the Small University Group this morning and about what the the lab, as it were, could do. And I think acting as a gateway to a, you know, a wider group or wider audience is a really useful thing because, you know, to has a wonderful set of contacts and has spent.
Mark Anderson: [00:21:05] How many years have you done? Now I’ve lost count, but good few years. And so there’s that back as well. That also is sort of Washington beneath us. And that’s quite I think that’s really useful because one of the other things that we can do on top of the sort of more hands on stuff in in terms of demonstrating things is effectively having a something. Well, in flippant terms, a brand to push this out to people. And that’s where actually the newsletter activity and we talk about is another really useful thing. So it’s an opportunity to help keep this to the fall. So it’s not necessarily about what we’re doing now, but what we’ve done or what we hope will be to come on the other. The other. I mean, one other thing because you were talking about, I’m reading the book at the moment, and he talks about the Lombardi Trophy. So I pulled out this piece of paper to remind me which I keep stapled up everywhere. Forget that it’s about matters, Marshall. But it was basically it’s, you know, these are the rules when you’re writing operational people in the service top to selection and maintenance of the aim. No. Two Maintenance of morale. Your biggest asset of the people.
Mark Anderson: [00:22:21] And I, you know, that’s something that you know, it’s always good to remind ourselves of. So yeah, if if things go a bit wobbly from time to time, well, that’s the nature of people. But the main the wonderful thing here and in the diaspora around of the those who are close to and associated with future text, is this wonderful range of inputs? And just one other thing I see on a practical level, one of the things I’ve been sort of trying to think to do is where to pull together some of the pieces of the existing puzzle, right? They are such in terms of, in a sense, the known knowns and without trying to turn it into a massive sort of library, but it’s almost to say, well, here is here is a sort of rough. Here is what we do or don’t understand in without being, you know, without deep technical terms, because that’s the edge. That’s the edge of the thing we’re nibbling at, I think. And, you know, in an area, I’m sort of happy to try and help with because it doesn’t require any particularly specialist knowledge in computer terms, but it requires sort of attention to detail. I’m quite happy to do so anyway, as I thought.
Frode Hegland: [00:23:40] Thanks, Mark. Peter. Are you muted still, Peter Stand?
Brandel Zachernuk : [00:23:51] I think your comments on
Frode Hegland: [00:23:53] The image has gone.
Brandel Zachernuk : [00:23:55] I think it’s cameras on and his laptop has shut.
Frode Hegland: [00:23:58] Oh, OK, well, while we’re waiting for Peter to reappear.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:24:03] Yeah. Oops. Sorry, I didn’t even realize it. Oh, OK. And say, Oh, what happened to my picture there? That’s weird, it took off my photo. That’s very odd.
Brandel Zachernuk : [00:24:17] I should as your camera on perhaps, and your webcam is covered. Hmm.
Peter Wasilko: [00:24:25] There we are much better. Thank you. Ok, so what I wanted to say was, I think maybe what we need is to have a research statement as opposed to a manifesto, just a separate discrete piece talking about the research side of the focus as far as politics go. I think our strongest angle is arguing for interoperability of systems and exchange of data across VR world and let applications for things like climate change be moved off to the periphery. Otherwise, it’s not really playing to our strength. We don’t have any climate scientists in our group, and that has us dabbling in areas that were visibly weakened. But we have a much stronger claim to the system interoperability side and the technical dimensions of it in terms of making sure that we don’t get stuck in a siloed world where we can’t merge models from meta versus Apple systems, and we get forced having to pick one Big Tech player and bet on that. And consistently when I pick one player’s technology, it winds up getting shelved. I had so many ways deeply into cyber dog and open dunk, and then they went away on me and they were always the best of breed technologies, and almost invariably they got sidelined because of corporate internal politics. So we don’t want to get trapped in that. As far as taking ownership of things, I’d like to take ownership of the idea of trying to get a shared programming test bed so that we can start plugging our code together. And I’d like to take partial exception to Frode notion that we shouldn’t be providing any guidance to the programmers among us. I’d be actually delighted to have Frode come up with the description of here’s the kind of a widget that I wish I had. Is it feasible to do this, something like that? And that would help give a little bit more direction to the coding experiments that I’m taking.
Frode Hegland: [00:26:26] Yeah, absolutely. I was just writing and chat a little bit of a summary, but first of all, I have sold this to you guys again and again, right? The reason I’m highlighting it again today, I was reading yesterday a section on fish and fish are much more interesting than I realized, but the strong relevance here is when you’re in liquid hearing and feeling so touch and hearing is basically the same thing. And that, to me, is like 20 years into the future with VR, where through whatever means, we will have complete body immersion by not taking the brain out like Elon Musk wants to do, but by using all this stuff we have, right? So I really think that one of the one of our jobs is to evangelize the power of VR and highlight the dangers of VR and by dangers. I don’t just mean social isolation and that stuff. I really mean opportunity cost of not investing in productivity. That’s one thing. The other thing is exactly that sharing data. That’s politics and infrastructure. And then it is a matter of building stuff and finally talking about all kinds of issues. In other words, we have very separate things in here that relates. We don’t have to choose one thing, right, guys. Uh, Overture Brandel.
Brandel Zachernuk : [00:27:53] Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. The sort of recognition that that the human sensoria is an essential thing to be able to kind of talk about and draw people’s awareness toward. Yeah, I mean, when one issue with using virtual reality at the time that that it is such a buzz word is that it doesn’t say include as much holistic consideration of that sensorium as as potentially using a term that is explicitly picked for that purpose. But also in terms of climate change, one of the things that I it occurred to me is that all of this work has been here and before has been motivated by other existential urgency in the past, not just not just Doug, but and not just Vancouver Bush actually, but also Lianne La Fontaine, who are arguably, you know, very, very central figures as well. Everybody knows the land like the mundane and people like. So so just the simple fact of the complexity of the modern world and the difficulty in navigating it sort of necessitates the perspectives that are actually not just central to the the sort of demands and concerns that we have, but also from a. From a historical perspective, the most common sort of line of argument and reasoning through what his future of tact has been, not just from this year, not just from these past ten years of your symposia, but also since the beginning of the concept, that text could be more meaningfully technologically augmented in the way that the mundane I am sought to do.
Brandel Zachernuk : [00:29:59] So yeah, I think. And, you know, while climate change is an important existential risk, it is actually no, it’s it’s distinct from sort of some of the other informational existential risks that we we sort of exist within today in terms of misinformation and the spread of those things like they’re related, but they are. But it’s a distinct one. We would have it even if we didn’t have climate change. And so, so it might may be helpful to actually broaden the field to those just to say that the those dire. And but neither of them are any less dire and existential than the other, like they threaten the very practicality and viability of the human project. And so being able to kind of talk in general about what it is about climate change and what it is about text that can be brought to bear against it, maybe a better mechanism for focusing what it is that the future of text does to a problem like that, because you’re quite right, we are not climate scientists. And to that end, like the climate, part of the climate change question is not something that we have a great deal of force against, but what we do is information processing and communication.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:31:34] Can I jump in on that and say two things? One will be a meta of the first thing, but fantastic point and a clarify where I came from. I was I was writing about this maybe two days ago, my own thoughts on, you know, where? Where I think future effects should focus and stuff like that and a surprised that in the writing, I started thinking about climate change. Not as comparing VR to climate change, I misrepresented it a little bit there. What I actually stumbled on was. You know, we don’t know much about climate change, but. It’s highly likely that we’ll all start spending way more time in our homes. And that say, for instance, because the weather will be so erratic, we’ll rely more on a system of drones or people delivering things to us because it’ll be so weird to go outside. And if that is the case, then it’ll be even more important that our homes start to represent way more than they currently do. And in that case, I could see the timeline for VR adoption actually being much more soon than previously expected, because it’s like VR is suddenly the only place where I can have an extra house in my house, you know, a house for working. And so that got me excited and I was like, Yeah, this is inevitable. This this path, if any of those statements have any truth to them, then the path to VR is certain and not simply for games or for metaverse. Right. So I can make this a core principle of mine now a meta statement on that. So I was thinking one thing too, and this absolutely should not be recorded, but whatever it’s going to be recorded and I’ll embrace it.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:33:24] This is a funny part about where we’re at, I think with with language and technology. I was just required to do a self-assessment performance review of myself at my job. And so I answered some things, and then I got angry at the questions because. They were asking of me to in one moment in time where I am situated right now to try and make statements about who I am, as if I was like an entity in a whole graph, like I could be that objective, right? So like, what are your career, short term career aspirations and long term career aspirations? I wound up saying, I’m a peacock. I got to fly, which I know is going to get me in trouble. But the point is that at that moment in the in the orphaned way that these questions were given to me, there is no way I could provide a sufficient answer. You know, I could in a conversation with someone, I could be much more honest and forthright, you know? But it’s weird that we’re we’re put into these situations. That’s why I wanted to stress and it is it is part and parcel. Maybe it’s impossible to get away from. But I think it applies even to the manifesto. Talk is like, you know, we create in moments. And then those moments and then what we create extends and blends into other contexts, and in some ways, that’s very unfair. And in some ways keeps me from even publishing, right? Because it’s like. It’s a funny, it’s a funny. Experience to touch on later. So that’s all I wanted to say.
Frode Hegland: [00:35:15] Ok, my turn again. Two things. One of them, please, I will tweet today or tomorrow about Friday, please tweet by yourself or retweet or something. We need some people there. But in terms of when I have further up their priority sharing data on all of that, we need to agree on a list. We put it on the website. Feel free to write them in here or blog about it or whatever, and we’ll have it. It’ll be useful. But the thing that really makes me so completely. Kind of I right, I’ve gone through I’ve been very lucky in my life. I have I have a wonderful parents, my well, my father left a few years ago when he died. And I have also had, you know, I come from a rich country, Norway. I live in the best country in the world, the United Kingdom. We have a health service here that has ridiculously impressive, et cetera. So I have basically missed a privilege on every single level as far as what has externally been given onto me. One of the benefits of that is I’ve had some clarity of vision. Many others have too. But I’ve had clarity of vision that has been removed from current realities like, I haven’t need to worry about losing this particular job and so on.
Frode Hegland: [00:36:38] That meant that I’ve been going through several stages of, Oh my god, this is going to happen. And that’s always been correct. It’s been mostly Doug. Like, you know, I’m only a small part of Doug’s vision, but it’s been that kind of stuff to save time, so you guys don’t have to listen to it. The big thing now is, and this is going to sound patronizing. It’s purely for clarity because you all, I’m sure, agree. Imagine if we take our entire lives and we say, No, you’re not allowed to live in a house, in a box or an apartment. You have to live in an actual box and we’re going to cut a sled out and you’re going to have a straw for food. That is all you’re going to be able to do in the future. That is actually where we live now compared to VR. The current VR is awful. You know, I had an almost an hour meeting with Mark today. It was shit. You know this much better view. And you know, it was a bit heavier my nose and all kinds of things. But it is comparing quick time, you know, 320 by 240 being useful, 640 by 480. Can you believe it’s possible? You know, when we look at what all of us here are, relatively mature people have lived through the fact that VR is going to unlock so many senses so soon.
Frode Hegland: [00:37:51] There’s just no question. But in order to have the imagination of what that will be, it’s actual work like, you know, somebody came into Doug’s office and he said, Doug, the problem with you is, you know, you’re just a dreamer. And he said, Well, dreaming is hard work. We in this group, we are doing that dreaming work. It’s really, really important and it’s really, really difficult. It has to be one of the things we do. So I therefore ask all of you in order to set the world on fire for everyone to realize that holy moly VR can offer mature VR like one or two years old can offer up the most incredible mind space. I think that everything we do should be let’s. Whether that’s doing demos, working on infrastructure, politics, whatever it is to open up the extreme potential that we are of VR and by VR, you know, I mean the whole gamut, I say Brandel is shaking his head like crazy. Do I have other head shakes or what’s the feeling? What’s the temperature of the room?
Brandel Zachernuk : [00:38:56] I’m excited, Mark, if you if you were if you were in VR, I’d be eager to hear what you thought of not just your head, but also your hands.
Frode Hegland: [00:39:06] Well, Mark zoomed into the horizons room. He was in Flatland.
Mark Anderson: [00:39:11] Can I can I? I’m sorry. Where do you think? Well, everyone’s waiting. Briefly, yes. So I was I was in TED flatland watching it. But but I thought, actually, funnily enough, despite Fred’s observation about its cruelty, I was actually pleasantly surprised and sense. It was a lot better than I thought the speed might. The moment I enjoyed the Masons were, they turn round and bite by sheer dint of time, he said. I think I’ve got a problem and I was thinking. You sure have. You got nothing from the waist down? And they were thinking, But why? Why do I need to see that? And I think the thing that I really took away from that session was one thing that the designers have got, really. I thought interestingly, right is with the hand movements were very good, but also the the facial gestures. So what I, as the 2D viewer noticed was, you know, I as you would in a conversation, so my eyes went to the face. So the fact that the body stopped at the waistline was hidden by, well, it’s hidden by the desk anyway. So there was no wasted effort there. And these are suitable and sensible and pragmatic illusions at this point of the technology stage. So I have to say, but bearing in mind, I’m coming from behind. I didn’t think it was a half bad experience, even though I wasn’t actually as it were in the room.
Frode Hegland: [00:40:33] Mark, you just wait till you get to the point where things in the world interfere with how you see this. It is a perception changer. It’s just very strange, but thanks for those words. Mr. Peter, who we can’t even see the face of normally who we look forward to seeing as a avatar puppet and VR soon. Please go ahead.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:40:53] I’d also like to note that some of what we need to build is really orthogonal to the fact that VR is offering a 3D experience. The key affordances of being able to lift something out of your laptop and put it into another environment doesn’t really even matter that the other environment is a 3D environment. What matters is that we build the infrastructure to be able to extract something from one display context and move it to another context, or to receive manipulation commands from one environment across environments in another one. And again, it’s completely orthogonal to the fact that one display is a 3D display. I also think we could probably do a lot of interesting things in 2D land with a 3D controller. I have that space mouse device, and if I could just get that to be talking to the JavaScript world, then I’d be able to be doing 3D manipulations, even though I’m only interacting through a 2D screen.
Frode Hegland: [00:41:54] Peter, you got to try it. There’s a lot we can do, absolutely, and there’s no question that it’ll be very useful to, you know, once every once we’ve made the future and everything is nice to go, sit in the park on your laptop and work on a flat screen and still have a 3D environment. Of course, that’ll be useful. No question about it, but it’s such a completely.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:42:18] Basically, I’m basically I’m sort of leaning to holding out for Apple’s headset with prescription lenses snapped into it. So I don’t have to worry about physical glass frames underneath the headset. And I have 8k. I need each eyeball as opposed to the current standards, assuming that those rumors are relatively likely to track out. I know the Brandel can’t talk about it, but hopefully it’s coming down the pike very soon.
Frode Hegland: [00:42:42] Peter, I ordered prescription inserts today. I went to buy opticians and had them fill in the form. So that’s that’s very interesting. I mean, all of this stuff is going to happen. You’ll have lasers going into your eyes. You don’t need a prescription. The lenses will fold automatically. All this amazing stuff will happen. But for us, as pioneers and inventors, the fact that there are so many niggles is absolutely amazing. That’s why we need to just feel this stuff. Mr Henderson.
Mark Anderson: [00:43:09] Yeah, I just reflecting again on the fact that I mean, the more I listen to some more I’m I’m so convinced that, you know, I think one area where we can definitely offer something that is needed and other people won’t have the incentive necessarily to do, but will gain from would be to be effective, begin to make the the something akin to visual matter for for VR and whether that’s moving in and out of or augmented virtual space or between different spaces within virtual space. Because I see no incentive apart from someone who’s got enough megalomania and money to want to capture the entire space. And hopefully no one will get that powerful because I put a big wall around it. But otherwise, you know, people will be making best effort to make something and they’re fine. But they will all, as these things do at any early stage, they’ll wander off in slightly different directions and they will look, you know, they will feel rather similar, but they will not talk to one another at the level where we really need them to. And you know, and this very much feels like a reprise from the middle of last year when we were banging our heads on on Visual Metron. Well, can we get anything? And although what came out in that instance seems laughably simple is perfectly extensible. And but we have something that’s there and in place and can be built off. And I think getting that sort of bedrock in place because it’s, you know, it’s a kind of infrastructure that no one ever asks for. They just don’t. It’s just not sexy, but it’s tremendously powerful and useful. And the great thing is, there’s an opportunity to do it now because there’s no one to tell us not to.
Frode Hegland: [00:44:49] Yes. Brandel, please, please.
Brandel Zachernuk : [00:44:53] So. Something that has struck me about computing from the inside over the last 20 years, and I’m not sure if I brought it up, I might have brought it up here. Doesn’t matter too much is that unlike the, you know, the great schism in the church after Luther, that at least people noticed that. But in fact, in computing, there is. There has been a schism done right down the middle of it since the very beginning between, I think the best names for it. I called it AI and control theory, but it’s it’s data processing and control theory. And and, you know, Doug is firmly on in the in the latter camp, I would argue. And VR as a sort of as a platform is the is the current sort of most radical manifestation of control theory. So by those terms, I mean, you know, data processing is where you do some non-interactive computing, mainframe computing style, run a job on some stuff and get some brilliant insight. But the mechanism through which it happens is more or less kind of closed from the from the start, whereas control theory is where you do stuff and you’re tightly integrated in the loop. And. Really virtual reality. One of the reasons why I actually encourage people to seek other terms in virtual reality is because it sort of implies that virtual reality is is good enough or that it’s sort of encompassing of all of the capabilities that that like or the people who are talking about virtual reality are in agreement with you about it.
Brandel Zachernuk : [00:46:41] Whereas I think terminology like spatial computing or embodied computing give a clearer sort of indication that there are a number of sort of faculties and capacities like you are talking about this sort of a tactile sensory on Friday. The fact that there is a there’s just a whole plethora of things that simply aren’t on anybody’s radar to really kind of address in any meaningful sense. I think those are actually at least as important as virtual reality and the visual like the spatial visual sort of models that they they seek to kind of kind of merry, merry up with because, you know, frankly, from what I’ve seen of the industry, so many, so many people believe that they’ll simply be done once they have, once they’ll have virtual reality and that nothing could be further from the truth. We all have this vast array of of sensory modalities, capacities that are sort of both direct and kind of.
Brandel Zachernuk : [00:47:47] Amalgams sent a synthetic synthesized from the combination of it, you know, the way that our thermos and our tactile perception combine in order to give a a higher level sets of wetness which can be hacked and broken through various things by sort of picking the exact right pressures and temperatures to make it seem as though something as water and the thermal conductivity and stuff like that. So. So like there’s there’s a lot more to do, and it’s I think it would be valid just in the same way as you’re aware that trying to pull people into the fold of what virtual reality affords the same job needs to be done on the people who are zealots for virtual reality to realize that their job isn’t done yet. Once they get that, they must do that, but they must be finished after it. So yeah, that’s one of the things that that may also help because it pulls it out of a buzzworthy sort of hype train kind of bandwagon into something that is. Clear that that it’s fundamentally about what we get out of our senses and being people and what we can do with computing. But yeah.
Frode Hegland: [00:49:09] That’s you are obviously dead, right? That’s exactly what needs to be done, and you know, I’ve ordered Jaron Lanier, his book should be here, should have been up today. Maybe tomorrow we’re going to read like mad to make sure I’m not repeating anything, but we do need to like the example that Alan just put in the chat. And also, when you look at recent movies like Foundation, you know where they have these hologram things, whether it’s a AR and VR, in one sense, is irrelevant. The point is that the environment can be whatever the heck you want it to be. And the amount of imagination the amount of experience is absolutely insane to get to where we need to go. So when it was actual, literal music to my ears, what you said because having been a text person for so long, all I’ve gotten is I will do it. Vr will do it. Excuse me. We’ll do which fit and just huh. Right, so it has to be built and, you know, that’s part of the discussion. Mark and I had earlier where we’re furiously fighting each other over the same point. Things in this space needs to be built and we need to know why we want to build it and what the potential is. So yeah, we need to evangelize this. So the question then becomes, how do we do that? What are we going to do in terms of, Oh, I don’t know which one of Gerrans book. I think it’s called VR or something. So, yeah, so so what are we going to do? I’m going to go through a list and you are going to shake your head if you don’t agree, this is stuff I think we’ve agreed on.
Frode Hegland: [00:50:46] Number one, we’ll keep doing an annual symposium. It’ll be more leaning in this world. Keep doing the book. We’ll have a monthly journal that we’re all going to figure out together what it means. I’ll be the head of that. I’m very excited for any feedback, including articles in it. Similarly, Alan is going to do the newsletter under the same kind of a model. We are also going to build demos. Brandel and Adam should feel feel free to do that. And of course, as much or as little feedback as they want will happen. Maybe at some point we need to find money to code for other people to do what is more boring. Within that, we have to work on some sort of a visual metaphor for VR because the insanity of not sharing information is scary. But we also need to basically write poetry. Right, we need to get this like, you know, like Adam is so angry at Ready Ready Player One. I think it’s a fun little thing, but every reason to be angry. I mean, this little chapter, I just read about fish in here. That’s where it’s really at, you know, when you’re properly immersed in an entirely new environment. But I’d really like to hear specifics from you guys what you want to do. Yeah. Dawn, of the new everything, yes. Oh, the book wise, yes, he’s got a good title there, but also.
Frode Hegland: [00:52:14] Mm-hmm. On Friday, one, I don’t know how many people will be there for Barbara Pope, a few. It will be nice for me to do a one minute introduction of her, but I also want to do an introduction of us. And what it would be nice to point to our Web site and say, this is our community now and we are kind of the core or staring or whatever you want to what? No. Peter. Anyway, distracting me like mad here. But please have a look at the websites, please. If there’s something you want me to add or remove, tell me. But also you can write your own stuff. It would be really good if everybody writes a really brief bio. And I think that in addition to logging into Alan’s crafts, I think it would be good if we had a resource page. All we have now is VR resources, and most of them don’t work. So specifically Brandel. Can you take a little time to add resources to the kind of VR things we can use an Oculus that you built? Yeah, OK, that would be fantastic. Oh, here is a specific question. So today, Mark was in a flat screen interacting with me and horizons. But let’s say that you Brandel have built a native Oculus thing in. You send it all to us and we look at it. Is there a way to live costs that to someone else could, for instance, until Peter and Mark jumps ship, could they view it?
Brandel Zachernuk : [00:53:49] So live, I’m I’m less certain of I know. I know that I can. From phone you can cast. But you can you can cast from your quest to your phone like this. And so that I could do that. It might be possible to. So if it’s if it’s quest negative, then you wouldn’t be able to do it, but on on on a Windows machine, if anybody has those, I have a couple lying around. You can use a quest as a. As a PR, as an Oculus Rift, so that tethered and it’s making use of your computer’s graphics card, which is great because most people who do gaming have a fairly beefy graphics card these days, and so you can you can you can get a lot more out of it.
Frode Hegland: [00:54:54] That’s PC only, right?
Brandel Zachernuk : [00:54:56] That’s correct at this point. Yeah, I mean, I’m not part of any discussions, but I would hope that given the power of Apple Silicon in particular, that it would be on that company’s roadmap to make sure it happens. But I’m not aware of any specific plans. But yeah, so to that end, you would it would be a much easier task than to stream that to Zoom because it’s being generated on the machine. And then you’d have the ability to direct it off. That wouldn’t work for anything. That’s Native Quest. But I don’t write anything which neither I write everything in web. So so it might be possible to grab that mirror and transmit it over Zoom. I would not on my privacy at the moment, but if I did that, then that would be possible. Otherwise. It might be possible again in Webb to build a virtual participants similar to to the Flatland participant that Mark was able to to occupy with a horizon. But that would need to be a consideration in the architecture of that system, but not a particularly difficult one. Beyond getting multiple participants in the first place, once you do that, you just say, Well, this one is just to do so. Yeah, I’m not aware of anything out of blocks other than being able to. So it requires no coding, no no particular interventions to do the screencaps stuff. It’s just gross. But yeah, beyond that, I’m not. I’m not aware of any other solutions that are available.
Frode Hegland: [00:56:27] So, yeah, that’s interesting. I see your hand mark, but I just wanted to say on the website I posted on a recent post Graphics of the Future. That’s Nvidia’s presentation. And yes, it’s all graphically nice and everything. But to see what is it? Scene description, language or something like that, to see some of the formats that are being used today as
Brandel Zachernuk : [00:56:51] Universal scene description. Yes, that’s what Apple touts for augmented reality. Quick look and what what Apple is promoting very strongly for the model HTML model element that I mentioned in the past.
Frode Hegland: [00:57:05] Ok, so this is important.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:57:08] So that display on M1 Macs, even if you don’t have a VR headset.
Brandel Zachernuk : [00:57:13] Usd, yeah. Oh, yeah, no, it’s built in to find it right now, so if you if you if you download a used file, for example, the ones on the Apple developer website of the 10 soldier and all that kind of junk, then you press space, they open up in quick work and preview. And if you have Xcode, then it’ll open it up in Xcode and you can kind of manipulate, modify it. There, at least, was in the past an application called reality converter that allowed you to sort of pick it open and export it to other formats. But yeah, it’s very it’s very much a format that Apple is committed to for the representation and trends and transmission of 3D data.
Frode Hegland: [00:57:55] Could you please post that on the website?
Brandel Zachernuk : [00:58:01] Yeah, I mean, in terms of the publicly available resources from Pixar and Apple on on mobile and on on our quick look and stuff like that, I’m happy to do that. Yeah.
Frode Hegland: [00:58:13] Ok. Fantastic. I’m just going to do a thing here. Resources links. But OK, so I’ve just on our blog World WordPress, we have one thing that called resources in brackets, links, books, et cetera. That’s where you probably want to do most of this. But we also have one called the resources brackets to view and VR. So if we can start populating some of that stuff, they’ll be really, really useful, especially the view in VR. Ok.
Brandel Zachernuk : [00:58:49] That’s a pain.
Frode Hegland: [00:58:50] So then I have to ask the question of such models. Are they? The descriptions very verbose? Or do you think they could be hidden inside visual metaphor? Smaller models? Um.
Brandel Zachernuk : [00:59:06] So models are if you’re talking about things like model geometry. Unfortunately, model geometry is incredibly verbose. You run megabytes and megabytes describing the 3D position of all of the vertices within a given 3D shape. And there are plain text formats representations. So the USD, as it’s defined by Pixar at this point, has two variants USD, ASCII and USD create USD and UCC. And ASCII has the ability to provide a more basic text descriptions of primitives like like spheres and cones and circles. But for the most part, people tend to be describing geometry. That’s also because the centre of mass of work, particularly in public that has been done with USD, has been by Pixar. And Pixar is in the business of moving billions of triangles around for the purpose of entertaining your children and developing the next great toy franchise system. So they’re sort of point of view on what USD is for is heavily, heavily biased towards those. That said, you know, there’s nothing to preclude USD being used primarily for its kind of informational relations. And in fact, it’s it’s a it’s a sort of a multi file format in the sense that you can create directories that nest into each other for relationship to each other. And there’s a concept of a USD prim or primitive that you can put all sorts of information. It’s sort of mandatory that it carries forward and respects any any additional data that it sees but doesn’t recognize in any given viewer. And that’s because from within Pixar, where it was made, they have a number of different applications that do a number of different things.
Brandel Zachernuk : [01:01:00] And just because one doesn’t use X doesn’t mean it’s allowed to strip that data out. So it’s amenable to a lot of the sort of the broad stroke format questions and concerns that people have in a way that’s much, much greater than the GL transmission format, which is the sort of the current format of choice for throwing 3D models around on the internet right now. So if you look at sketch fag, for example, you can pull down all of the VR previews that you’ll see in Quest are facilitated through Gildea. Gildea is, but is very much considered to be a last mile format, something which is the end of the line for a piece of information such that if you really cared about it, you would be retaining a separate kind of representation of it for the benefit of being able to do your HD remaster. So what have you? So, yeah, USD is very, very valuable right now. Nobody is considering it from a perspective of informational provenance or relations because of the the work that people are doing. And to the extent that I would comment on Apple as a company because people work there on graphics and technology, they consider it in terms of that graphical technology and vertices and shaders and stuff like that, rather than informational context, content and context that we think is probably more important. But I would say that it’s probably amenable to it. So very much worth looking at how concepts like visual matter can be brought to bear against what’s already present within USDA as well.
Frode Hegland: [01:02:29] That is really, really interesting. I see there are many hands up, but I have to ask this question. When you’re in, let’s say, VR work rooms, just to take an example, you have your monitor there. Can you imagine a way where you touch something on your screen and then something on the screen? There’s some kind of a hook that that data now becomes accessible in the room. Is that a complete pipe dream, or is that something that can
Brandel Zachernuk : [01:02:51] Be worked towards? Do you mean where you can pull a model out of a page and then it becomes some artifact distinct from a page? Yes. So I mean, in a web browser, if you click unless people have done nefarious things, which for the most part do. Unfortunately, at this point, if you click and drag on a picture within a page, it drags out and you can put it onto your your desktop in the 2D sort of parlance. Is that the sort of essentially the equivalent functionality you’re imagining?
Frode Hegland: [01:03:24] Yes, but enter the VR 3D space.
Brandel Zachernuk : [01:03:28] And that’s not a capability in Oculus, it’s it’s a sort of a basic tenet of web usability that I would expect most people would would would aim to include within their systems. It’s certainly not something that should be impossible. I mean, generally speaking, people will break that on the web if they feel like it. You know, in the same way that when when Facebook writes Advertisement Advertisement in the feed, it’s actually a discontinuous letter so that you can’t find it and use that as a as a basis to hide that component of the page. People will ruin your experience. But generally speaking, I think the expectation would be that, yeah, you should be able to model that and and take them where you want.
Frode Hegland: [01:04:13] So currently, the way it works is you send me a URL. I go on the web browser and Oculus and I get a normal thing and then it says, View in VR. I click that button and it goes out. But that is only something that can be done from there to there. I can’t do that into, let’s say, horizons work room or immersed or anything like that. And that is, of course, part of the goal we want for the future.
Brandel Zachernuk : [01:04:39] Right, right. Yeah. So that’s you know, I’ve said in the past, I’m sure other people are aware and agree that the software is bureaucracy sped up, and bureaucracy always encompasses and is a crystallization of a value system. So to the end that if it’s simply not part of something its value system, then it’s not going to be. It’s not going to be preserved as a capability within the context of web. That’s a little bit more open ended than the sort of the values of of the web are much more sort of radically inclusive and considerate than anything that a specific vendor will create. I guess we were just not talking about you, but we’re talking about Facebook and and applications and commitments to things like drag and drop and the preservation of artifacts that that that might be present within spatial documents and stuff like that. Yeah. So there’s no particular reason to expect that that would be a mandatory part of any third party application that people have the ability to like, determine sort of the response from whatever user actions and inferred various intents for better or worse. So there’s there’s very little that anybody could do in that context, in the same way that people will also be able to ruin web, they can ruin their own native apps by default. But but I would hope that that same defaults will prevail within the web context as it moves into space as well.
Frode Hegland: [01:06:15] Thanks, Brandel Ike. Ok, Mark.
Mark Anderson: [01:06:19] Listening to Brandel, I just I was thinking I was when you were describing the two forms of us. I was thinking, So is this a bit like saying, Well, you could if you really knew PostScript Well, you could. You could read it and read it as text. But that’s not what humans on the planet, if any. Whereas we have other forms. So that’s pretty interesting to see because I think one of the things that I’m sort of happy to help put a shoulder to is to try and put a circle around maybe the number of formats, which hopefully are far fewer because I come with Eleanor or Peter. Carnley posted a page from 2015 about someone who said, Well, here we are. These are the 72 graphic formats we found, you know, or sorry, it might have been you. And I thought, Yeah, well, that’s sort of something we might usefully do in this space of, you know, it’s a place where other people are looking because, as you rightly said, that’s not where people’s focus is now. They’re just building stuff, you know, to make nice movies or make better experience. They’re not necessarily thinking about who owns what or where it goes. And just what my how is that actually for something early? We’re just saying when we went through this list of things, I’d just drawn some threads together as saying and just us keeping an eye on when we’re talking about sort of demos in the sense of within demos, what what things that we might actually be doing in the demo.
Mark Anderson: [01:07:48] So in a sense, there’s the manifestation of the demo that makes something that is what you see in the demo, I guess is another way of putting it. So, you know, it is it is no small matter work often to make the demo in any way, shape or form. But it’s an also interesting question. Having having, you know, got to the top of that mountain, what do I actually see? What’s the view? I see what? What are we doing inside this thing we’ve created? And that’s something I think we’re collectively between us. We could help hone that because I do know my sense is that sometimes I’ve often found it’s much easier to implement somebody else’s spec because I don’t have to worry about the constraints if the constraints in some way stop me doing well. I can go back and say, Look, I can’t do that or I need I need more flex, but otherwise I just don’t have to worry about those things. All I have to note I know is I need to make one of these at the end. And that can be perhaps helpful as well as useful in terms of, you know, what we want to do at the very sort of demo end of things. Peter?
Alan Laidlaw: [01:08:55] Ok. One of the points that was raised in the cyberspace. First Steps book was the notion of having cyber decks that would be able to view the models and having different levels of hardware looking at the same model. So if you were on a really low fidelity device, you could just simply pull in again, maybe just a textual representation of the 3D scene for someone who’s only working on an old style BlackBerry connected to the net. Whereas if you were in a holographic suite somewhere, you might actually be able to walk around with goggles, free, full, immersive VR, and that would be a function of your local processing power independent of the model. And I think as we move forward, we want to get away from detailed descriptions of the models themselves and abstract out the description of what kinds of objects we want and how they relate to each other, so that our description of the scene we really don’t care necessarily about the. Shader, on the back cushion of the chair, what we want is an end user would be to say, OK, there is a Victorian chair in the back left corner of the room and then let the system decide how it’s going to represent that.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:10:12] So we have to get away from the notion of everybody seeing the exact same representation of the object and move more to the object in the abstract. And that would let us have very compact visual matter representations of things that, again, your visual matter might just say Victorian chair, and then your cyber deck would decide how it’s going to represent that in whatever environment you’re currently working in. We could put the actual geometry in the Interplanetary File System based upon content hashes, and then the visual data would be very compact because we don’t want all that raw data in the visual matter. A system could go and retrieve that all of the visual media really needs to have is the core notion of what kind of an entity is and the relationship among the entities and then push off all the work and how to render that to some client application that we don’t need to care about.
Brandel Zachernuk : [01:11:01] Yeah, so in terms of in terms of the ability to represent something as canonically this particular chair and then seek alternate representations based on what deck, so to speak, that people are kind of running it on, that’s also something that’s sort of a responsibility that I would I would say USD is dimly aware of in the form of what are called USD variants. Having the ability to say under some circumstance, you can use this under some other circumstance. You can do that again, though, because because it’s it’s been sort of birthed from the center of Pixar’s data flow formats, the mechanism through which they they are considering what kind of determinations might give rise to this being the the choice for us that are relatively coarsely defined. In contrast to if you’re familiar with web, we have things things like media queries and people do various breakages on on detecting aspects of the user agent. So those are sort of at some level actually distinct from the the system for doing. The choosing is distinct from what the contents of those choices are. Whereas in USD, because they have had total control in a context of total trust over those things, those constraints aren’t those considerations aren’t as well thought out within the context of like, what is it safe to choose? Where is it safe to choose it from that are absolutely necessary considerations at every level, at every moment within the web, because it’s simply such an untraceable computing and executional context.
Brandel Zachernuk : [01:12:52] So there will be a number of additional concerns that need to be brought to bear against it. As people become more aware of how valuable it is to be able to pull these model files down these UCSD’s and other things. Yeah, so so to the extent you mentioned the APFS right now one, the expectation is that model variants would only be reloadable from a subdomain of the location that the root asset is at. And that’s just because you can’t trust things on the internet, and hopefully you can trust things under the directory. You host your file up. And and if you can’t, then that’s very sad for you and we shouldn’t trust you at all. But yeah, so so those things are part of those considerations. There will need to be additional thinking and additional constraints put on it as a consequence of how dangerous the internet is.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:13:56] I suppose we can trust things that have a content hash on them, though, so it shouldn’t really matter what domain it floating from. As long as the hash agrees with the hash that you’re looking to find.
Brandel Zachernuk : [01:14:06] Uh, that’s not always true, I mean, the thing the fact is that RSA is I have been have been broken, people have managed to create collisions. Cryptography is on is one tool in a in amongst others, as as a mechanism for determining truth and trust. So theoretically, I I wouldn’t trust it.
Frode Hegland: [01:14:30] So this is obviously a really core and important discussion, but also an ongoing discussion. Definitely something I’m super passionate about. I say Allen has his hand up.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:14:46] Yes, a couple of topics. One. And I’m just throwing this in, Craft is perhaps another demo prompt, which is a section of creating. I have a possibly a bad habit of whenever there’s an article that I want to read and applies the email as well. I immediately send it over to some reading service like Instapaper or Matter, and that is where I’ve become used to processing a thing. And it’s almost as if these days I can’t read anything, and this applies a thousand percent at work. Emails come through and threads come through, and I’m just copying and pasting it. So I know that I can read it in whatever else, right? Because I can’t process it unless I sort of own it, you know, and know that there’s a version there, and I’ll sometimes link back to the actual Gmail thread the source of truth. But that that makes me wonder about, Oh, hello. It makes me wonder about that. What does that look like in VR? And and separate from the VR, putting that aside for a moment. The fact that that has become a a normal behavior that we all have is really interesting in its own right. It’s as if it’s a new technology that we don’t have a word or term for yet, but it’s definitely something that I think I’m not alone to say. It feels nice to take X article, put it in your station and tinker with it, and I pinpoint or frame it that way to say like, I think that’s different than personal knowledge management than obsidian in Rome.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:16:34] I think that those swallow that that portion, but it’s a different thing. So I wanted to bring that up. And then also at some point, just getting to the the tactical brass knuckles stuff. I love to either use craft obsidian or someplace where we can do async work and dump the stuff I think is critical, and I think we should talk about that. The channel link the the four varieties of channels that when teacher came up with and working with students remotely, I think is a really good start and explanation of the value of async workshop assignments, et cetera. And then with that, I think that, you know, there should be some rules that go along with it, right? Like not to not to call you out a little bit fraud, but. Like, wherever we wind up doing our work station when something’s posted. It should stay there, right? Whatever, it’s whatever it’s called. So if we start with like. You know, innocuous locations and names or whatever. Just knowing that, hey, it’s going to be there, it may find a it may become curated, push down and pushed out, and that’ll be something different. But once once we share something with each other, it should like, stay in that rough location.
Frode Hegland: [01:17:52] You’re referring to the discussion over the weekend that was taken up for political reasons, but it’s being re-edited. But I take your point completely, completely, completely. And so this
Mark Anderson: [01:18:07] Is the journal essentially, isn’t it? I mean,
Frode Hegland: [01:18:09] It should be the journal, and we’re kind of having a little bit of a reset on that. But first of all, it would be really nice, Allen, if you could share that Kroft access to us again. And also in terms of the journal, you know, a lot of our chat here is internal chit chat and random things. But there has been a few things that Brandel has talked about towards the end. One of them kind of document formats that’s really valuable to real people. So that’s why I’m so happy to take the transcripts entirely into the journal. I don’t expect people to read them through unless they have absolutely no life. But it should make things findable from there. Yeah. Also the issue that you said, Alan, earlier on today.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:18:57] How can you even remember, by the way, we need to stay high. Well, Leah, oh.
Frode Hegland: [01:19:05] Oh, we’ve been typing high in the chat, sorry, yes.
Brandel Zachernuk : [01:19:08] Oh hi, everybody.
Mark Anderson: [01:19:11] Hello. Hello.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:19:14] Yeah, thanks.
Brandel Zachernuk : [01:19:16] Let me just go whether it’s light so they can see my face.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:19:20] Oh oh oh. Where are you in the world? I see you now. We can see you. Yes. Yeah. Am I good? I’m fine.
Frode Hegland: [01:19:31] Oh, we’ll hear you very well now. Where are you?
Alan Laidlaw: [01:19:35] Thank you. Yeah.
Brandel Zachernuk : [01:19:40] Oh, I am privileged to be here.
Mark Anderson: [01:19:47] I just burst by accident. You know,
Brandel Zachernuk : [01:19:49] I was reading the email that
Alan Laidlaw: [01:19:51] Was sent to Nigeria. All right. Oh, wonderful. Hey. That’s that’s fantastic, I hope. Oh, I hope you can hear us. I didn’t want to interrupt you, fraud midway, but I just wanted to say hello and I’d love to hear more about you.
Frode Hegland: [01:20:13] Yeah. I’m so glad that Wally is there, he’s in and our book as well, of course. And yeah, no, all I wanted to say is, you know, it’s so strange once you get into any kind of an interest group, people are that interest group tend to be a bit obsessive. You know, just look at Keith and typography. He will know every detail about every front in the whole world, which is great, but also not in the kind of future of text community. There is this reverence of text, as we should have. But also, I think we have to accept that most text, we just don’t have time to read. So your comment earlier, Alan, is really, really crucial, and I think that at least part of what we tried to build should be a way to get rid of texts. So that we can have really good collaboration between us, really good ways to to to put useful text together, but not just to keep making bigger text mountains.
Brandel Zachernuk : [01:21:15] Agreed. I would say that one of my goals is not necessarily less text, but also more ownership over text in terms of what what we get to do to manipulate it. The main things. One of the things that is problematic for me with the overflow of tabs, which is actually a relatively recent phenomenon for me to say, is that there are these were all paper documents. I’d have the ability to arrange them in stacks and piles, and they’d be able to kind of dominate my perceptual field, my sensorium as my word of the day in various ways, for various reasons. So if I had a whole stack of things that related to each other, then I could put them together and pack them next to me. Whereas when I have a browser with tabs, they are all only they’re arranged in that one dimensional space. But I’m not allowed to, and to some extent I’m allowed to pen and scale those representations in order to have itemized. I quantified versions of it on the left and stuff like that, but it’s an incredibly poor cousin of the kind of spatial relating that I have the ability to do with real artifacts within a real space that I get to own, you know, and that’s that I get to own part of it is just as important because, you know, there are various things that people have done in Finder and File Explorer and Microsoft and Apple that have taken or taken away or or given various kind of relational capabilities.
Brandel Zachernuk : [01:22:43] You have the ability to move icons around and in other places. At other times you don’t. And sometimes those things are allowed to have semantic significance and other times they aren’t sometimes remembered and sometimes they’re not. And I think one of the things that’s important for us to be able to do is recognize the totality of the semantic significance that people will be able to imbue things with as a consequence of preserving, honoring and transmitting that the relational and organizational kind of priorities that are specified through those things. And again, not something I have a great deal of confidence in the current generation of virtual reality and spatial computing sort of developers and researchers to recognize the significance of. And I would hope that people involved in the future of text have the ability to kind of convey just how much is important about all of the other aspects of information to those people so that they know that it’s not just about polygon count and shader model.
Frode Hegland: [01:23:47] Indeed. Oh, Alan’s Scott, to signed up.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:23:53] Oh, no, sorry, that was a legacy hand. I’ll drop it just quickly.
Mark Anderson: [01:23:58] I’m by dint of pressing the right dropdown. I am now seeing the craft stuff, so I’m definitely in. I’ve got I’ve managed to, I’ve managed to claw my way and the mistake I made. So I did all the on boarding stuff. I got the app. What I didn’t realize is when I logged in, it had my name at the top and I basically had to click and drop down and go into the effect of the shared space. But it’s all showing now.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:24:22] Ok, great. What you’ll see in there is just a real garbage fire of my thoughts at any given time, please don’t read any of it. You know, maybe, but it’s open there. If you do wind up reading it, I don’t I won’t defend any of it because a lot of it, they’re not even complete
Mark Anderson: [01:24:39] Your garbage far. I to be in mind. So don’t worry.
Frode Hegland: [01:24:43] You cannot but subscribe to it, so to speak. And the app. Is there a link or is it only on the web page or how does that?
Alan Laidlaw: [01:24:49] Yeah, if you if you are in craft, apparently. You have to go to the top right sidebar and pick the dropdown, and you should see future of Tex Labs as an option. And it’s the kind of thing where at least I’ve just been putting my thoughts over the course of the day is, ah, during meetings, and I’m happy to do another format, specifically one that doesn’t matter only, but just having a place that’s sort of open and can can can hold thoughts as they come up and be organized passively like books, mentioned VR formats, et cetera, I think is going to be essential to moving forward. Personally, where I this is where even though it seems like a small deal to just log in to to WordPress and find an area, I find that an unfocused workstation is far more useful to just capture information.
Frode Hegland: [01:25:47] So I can’t log in. Alan, I can’t see it.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:25:51] You are craft account.
Frode Hegland: [01:25:53] Yeah, fro dot dot com.
Mark Anderson: [01:25:56] So top left.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:25:58] I think I sent it to liquid.
Frode Hegland: [01:26:02] Oh yeah, please send it to you.
Mark Anderson: [01:26:03] Thank you. When you’re logged in, you’ll see probably your name top left next to the three open minimized close buttons
Frode Hegland: [01:26:11] On the market’s top right.
Mark Anderson: [01:26:13] Oh well, on my Mac, it’s top left. I’m using the native client.
Frode Hegland: [01:26:17] I’m using the native client, so they’re well here.
Mark Anderson: [01:26:20] I will send you a screengrab of what I mean.
Frode Hegland: [01:26:23] My screen grab is better than yours.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:26:27] Very good. I’ve got to jump, though. Maybe next time we can walk through some of this, but great conversation. Yeah, we’re getting well, still around. I’d love to hear more about Oh yeah, he’s back. Maybe next time I’ll have an introduction or get to know you a little bit more. Unfortunately, I have to. I have to go.
Frode Hegland: [01:26:54] Yeah, we’re close to the top of the hour. Bottom of the hour, depending on how you look at it. Look forward to seeing as many as possible on Friday. And then we will, you know, please comment on what’s on the front page of the of the sites. Please post whatever you want and.
Mark Anderson: [01:27:13] Afraid I stuck up, I stuck up a screengrab of my clearly different and inferior aircraft client’s UI, but because when it opened up, it had my name and when I clicked that dropdown, I saw the the magic stuff.
Frode Hegland: [01:27:35] There it is. Yeah, it was it was awesome. Very good.
Mark Anderson: [01:27:40] So what you meant was the it was the other right, was it not?
Frode Hegland: [01:27:44] Alan said. Left, Helen said, Right, this is on the left. You see you do the same thing anyway. Yeah. See you later, guys. Peter, any last things and then Keith, any first things before you go. We haven’t heard a single word from you. That’s because I’ve
Alan Laidlaw: [01:28:02] Been on mute. Apologies for dropping in late, sorry, I got distracted writing,
Mark Anderson: [01:28:10] Which is not a bad thing to be distracted by.
Frode Hegland: [01:28:12] No, it’s not. Are you also joining us on Friday for Barbara, who will be here? Yeah, please do tweet and tell people to come. It should be interesting to have a medium size group. All right, thanks for today and well, I’m glad you’re here. It’s good to have you guys. Thank you. Have a great week. Bye bye.
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