Tr : 21 March 2022

Video: https://youtu.be/laufAq5ZIGg

Chat: https://futuretextlab.info/2022/03/22/chat-21-march-2022/

Frode Hegland: Yeah, people do tend to enter at random times.

Chris Gutteridge: So yes, I’m kind of.

Chris Gutteridge: Blocked this one out today. I don’t know. I don’t usually if you said specifically this one, I have.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. There will be people there.

Bob Horn: The tidying away, the spray paint. I don’t like using spray paint, but I haven’t got the.

Chris Gutteridge: Hang of not.

Bob Horn: I need to learn how to use that airbrush primer so I can do it without having butter tans. Which is on my to do list, but.

Chris Gutteridge: So. You’re funny. Oh.

Frode Hegland: So I was coming in and.

Chris Gutteridge: Then.

Frode Hegland: I’m not sure if.

Chris Gutteridge: What I’m seeing.

Fabien Benetou: Is here.

Frode Hegland: Fantastic.

Bob Horn: I look very pious because I’ve got the camera lower than the monitor. So people, it looks like I’m praying for divine guidance or something.

Chris Gutteridge: Fair enough. Good morning.

Frode Hegland: Morning. Morning. So, Chris is there today. Fabian. Have you met Chris? I can’t.

Chris Gutteridge: Remember.

Fabien Benetou: I don’t think so.

Frode Hegland: Since everyone else knows everyone else, including whoever else may. Come on the call. Can you guys briefly introduce each other to each other?

Chris Gutteridge: Short.

Fabien Benetou: But you start.

Chris Gutteridge: Yeah. All I know, Frode, because I to start as a PhD that was quite similar to his Ph.D. Not I don’t, it didn’t go in the same direction, I think. But the idea is that the starting points of what makes us angry is quite similar. And he did better with his Ph.D. than me. I eventually gave up in disgust because it was about studying scholarly, augmented, so digitally augmented, scholarly communication. And I discovered I really hate reading and writing research papers, which does not make you a good PhD student. But my actual day job, I’m a research program of the University of Southampton. My favorite was studying and my big thing is I’ve worked on were open access research repositories and open data, so RDF, semantic web and things like that. But as a programmer, not a researcher, so I’m a doer rather than a I was like, can I actually make this thing work? And you, Fabian.

Fabien Benetou: It’s a bit familiar in terms of mindset. I’m a prototype typist, so I like new thoughts and I definitely need research to. Eat good ideas, discover new ideas. But in the end, I need to challenge these by trying to build something and see those ideas being the aesthetics or being beautiful behind that if we can actually build something out of it. My motivation for this, and also because I focus on bio and are on the web to be specific, is because I have a bunch of notes on any topic for how many time I went to it did not go actually to the swimming pool, to philosophy, to anything really. Languages, programming languages. But they are stuck behind the thin screen in front of us and it doesn’t feel right. I want to be able to pull them out of the screen, to have Post-it notes on them, to throw them in the air or touch them on the floor and then be able to find structure behind those hidden connections. So I’ve been working on on building prototype for organizing my notes in VR anymore and in any kind of spatial way to organize information. And through that I had quite a few discussion also with the Brandel and then Brandel told me that this group was the place to be that.

Frode Hegland: We’re certainly. We certainly have the passion. Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you.

Fabien Benetou: I don’t remember if you said that word for word, but that was the meaning for sure.

Chris Gutteridge: Yeah. I mean, did a project on spacial thinking and trying to put ideas out in 2D space and doing drag the novel thing with drag to open links. So instead of clicking to open something and it appearing somewhere, you drag it and drop it where you wanted it and the link would remain as a link to where it came from. And then I got bored and did other things and Freud got annoyed because he wanted me to be more frustrated. Less annoyed.

Frode Hegland: Two things. Brandel suggested this book. You all have it right. That’s pretty useful. Chris I think you would like.

Chris Gutteridge: It.

Frode Hegland: For sure. Now one thing that Fabian wanted us to discuss, which I completely agree with, which spent some time.Is what text is. But first of all, I think we should talk about what virtual reality versus augmented reality is, because I’d like to know if you guys agree with me on the basic premise that the only difference between AR and VR is time. The reason I say that is because even today with an Oculus, once you set up a guardian space, if you go through that, the renderings of what is beyond it appears. So it’s not fully enclosed anyway. So I think that as hardware gets better, you will be able to toggle more easily between AR and VR. So it’s kind of a early, early phrase and therefore I don’t really care. I don’t want to spend too much time on it. I think that VR is more important. Some people think air is more important, and that’s just such a small difference. Any comments or thoughts on that?

Fabien Benetou: So technically speaking, for sure you can do. You can do air in VR for example with a quest that other headset like virtual. So the one thing though that is a bit beyond that is room understanding or how the headset we know that the table is a table and that part, as far as I can tell, is not solved. It doesn’t mean we won’t be solved in five or ten years, but to do it in real time or that, for example, a golden frame is a golden frame, or that then you can pick that frame and move it around. So far I haven’t seen anybody do it. There are a lot of tricks, but to do it fully in real time and that’s going to make a big difference instead of just being a background basically that you can really interact with.

Chris Gutteridge: I think two very good tricks for that. They were both. Tricks. But so I’m not sure if they would count into that category. But the vive we did a project say we appear to have Frode maybe a couple of years before his time played with a Vive and literally gaffer taped the controllers to a keyboard and tape on a chair, I think in a room. And I did have the experience of walking up to a VR chair in VR and picking it up and it being a real thing in front of me. Which was the very much the bare bones. And I’m trying. They had a they had a controller on the front that could 3D map your hands into the world. So you held your hands up like a lawnmower man and you actually saw them, which was kind of cool to give your hand actually appeared. But also what it fell down was they tried to see you typed on the keyboard and the keys went up and down and the key and they couldn’t quite get the resolution so that it actually.

Frode Hegland: So if so, if this was a spy movie, this is where you’ve been outed as a spy. Chris, because the hand mapping and keyboard thing and Oculus is flawless. Now, one of those things that’s been solved. So that means you haven’t been in recently so naughty boy anyway.

Chris Gutteridge: But the other the other thing I saw was the one from Silicon Valley that narrows it down, which is the lab up in Oakland, I think it was, that has it doing things in the real world by projecting onto sheets of paper and things. And they were just identifying items and their rotation and position by colored dots. And it’s not perfect but using. Something very. Instead of trying to get the computer to match the perfect things as a compromise to getting the tech better, it’s easy to get a computer to identify a known shape. If you’ve got a color and pattern, you’re knowing that that unique pattern rotated and mutated like this should be pretty easy.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That work is all interesting. Anyway, let’s go into since before we.

Peter Wasilko: Get before we get started, I’d like to give you a micro demo of my first baby steps into VR integrating the Babylon JS 3D library with the programming language I’ve been using for all of my research.Okay, let’s.Share my screen for a second. Okay. See where is the correct window? All right, this should do it. Hi, Bob. Oc can you say? Can’t say. Yeah.Okay. So there it is.

Frode Hegland: Cool.

Peter Wasilko: And the code is relatively elegant. I have it set up so that the different basic shapes that the library supports will be represented as custom tags slash web components. And it’ll be able to build that up. So right now, the actual source code for that, I will paste into the chat. I can stop sharing now that just show you that it does actually work.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. I wonder what the repercussions of that will be. Very interesting.

Chris Gutteridge: No, I will take just a tiny little bit.

Peter Wasilko: Of code to give you a feel for that in the chat.

Chris Gutteridge: Window now. Thank you. And then I will show you.

Peter Wasilko: Code for one of the basic shapes. Just a box shape pasting that in. And then for our main content. That you actually see in the window. It just consists of. So it’s very clean and painless to work with. We’ll see whether the other library features integrated smoothly as the basic drawing a couple of cubes.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, that’s very, very cute, but very cool. We have to come back to that properly, I think. Yeah, definitely. So the two major things on the agenda, first one is what we think text is. And just separately with Fabian this weekend, I’ve just said that to me. I don’t actually care anymore. I care mostly about working in VR. That’s what’s crucially important, however, not social, not gaming, not just imagery by itself, but I think that really does cover everything. But Fabian yes, thanks for the link to Dynamic and that’s exactly what Chris was talking about. Anyone else want to talk about how they see text now in relation to what we’re all doing together and so on?

Fabien Benetou: So I’m happy to jump in because I provoke this a bit and because to me and it’s strange that you say that you’re more interested in VR now, in the sense that I came to this group for text, but I don’t know what text is anymore. And that’s some of the questions we had about how do we capture the video is the video of our discussion even without yet being becoming text either through machine learning or through human, because we know it will be text. Is it like potential text or text? That will be so I’m I’m saying I’m asking the question also because I’m not sure what it is anymore. I don’t want to mix it, let’s say, with information or with knowledge. And but I don’t think it’s fair, especially if we explore more and more VR or the medium or the mural, for example, from above to to to say that it’s text or maybe not to say that it’s not text, because if we just say it’s a bunch of letters or characters stuck together, then we haven’t been doing that for a while, which I personally don’t mind.

Fabien Benetou: But it’s a little bit awkward. And I think for people who are curious about augmented text or about this group, at least I believe that that has to be clarified because otherwise it means we might be confusing, doesn’t mean we’re confused so we don’t dig. What’s the most interesting and I believe we are digging what’s most interesting, but that defining what text is beyond letters or characters stuck together would be valuable, in my opinion. What it might be. And I’m saying this completely candidly, I did not take the time to think it through, but it’s it’s a piece of information that we have performance on so we can manipulate it. We might might be copy pasting, might be reading, might be annotating through Post-it notes or whatever. So that’s a bit how I see text. And of course, because we can put in text which text or even web based, it’s text that can also include an image that can include any other medium in it. But as long as it has those properties of being manipulable to me, at least that that’s what I would put as text.

Peter Wasilko: Is this a seriously raised question, and is the group serious about defining it? If it is, then we have to decide on what level and what domain or context we’re talking about and probably where in my from what I’ve been hearing, we’re using the word text for about oh, in the order of of 20 to 75 different concepts and and we use the same word text for them and, and we’re going to go around and around and around with this sort of sloppy definitional talk unless we get serious about defining different aspects of it. It doesn’t mean you have to define all of it, but you do have to define serious pieces of it or domains of it and have names for them. Otherwise, we’re going to go around and around. We’ll be having this discussion six months from now and three years from now. I hope they will.

Frode Hegland: You I hope we will have the discussion three months from now and six years from now.

Bob Horn: Because my I will I will not be joining it because unless unless there’s unless you’re serious about doing some serious defining.

Frode Hegland: So and I say if I say you have your hand up, the thing is, this is the kind of thing that is useful, I.

Chris Gutteridge: Think.

Frode Hegland: To consider from different perspectives. But right now, this group is about the journey between virtual reality and traditional back and forth. Because I think it’s important. I think it’s the most important question for humanity right now, because it can help us understand things like climate crisis, it can help us deal with other things. That’s an augmentation opportunity. So I completely agree with you, Bob, on the premise of your question. And if you asked me this before Christmas, I would have just just shut up and agreed with you without any qualifications. But in the context of here, every once in a while to have this discussion in a sloppy way, try to make it more rigorous, but just in order to broaden our brain, our brains, rather than to kind of narrow them down, I think is a good idea. Because after we’ve gone through this discussion, we’re going to be talking about Egyptian history, which of course a lot of it is non textual, a lot of it is textual and I think that when I don’t know, first of all guys, have you had a chance to read the document I sent the one on the Egyptian Museum. We’ll go through a little bit of that now in this chat because it is very, very relevant to to this. But anyway, that was just a little bit back to you, Bob and Peter.

Peter Wasilko: Which of first.

Frode Hegland: Which. Peter? Peter.

Chris Gutteridge: Peter. Okay.

Peter Wasilko: To my mind, we can describe text as being a linear sequence of symbols drawn from some alphabet which can contain overlapping sub sequences or the original sequence. And those sub sequences themselves can be passable by two or more grammars. So to my mind, it’s the key of having a sequence of symbols and an associated grammar that’s used to person to find their meaning. And that allows you to have one sequence of symbols which could be possible in multiple grammars, and it can also have multiple sub sequences in a stream of text passing through different grammars. But I think that’s the key. I mean, that bridge between the sub sequences and the grammars used to analyze them.

Frode Hegland: I would agree with you to a very high degree theater, but then it becomes the interesting thing of pretexts and an aspect of it. For instance, when you text between two iOS devices today. Fortunately, it doesn’t work between Windows and iOS. You can tap on the message and choose to do a thumbs up or a heart, etc. That’s glued to that message as a reply. That doesn’t actually fulfill many of those things. And again, Peter, I agree with you that that’s what text is. So these extra textual elements become more and more important. And when we start putting text on a mural and having red lines going between textual elements like in a TV murder wall, those lines become part of the interpretation, value, context and meaning of that text. So that’s why it’s so exciting to look at exactly what you said, Peter, where again, third time I agree with you, but the layers on top of it becomes very much part of the actual text itself, even more maybe than the typeface it may be rendered in.

Peter Wasilko: Okay. In that case, I would amend my definition to have the sub sequences associated with grammar and other metadata. And the other metadata could include attacks that are linked into it, VR attributes and anything else. But the key, again, to my mind, is being able to take and also I also have to say that the sequences don’t necessarily have to be contiguous. So you could have a composite sequence that consists of the first five paragraphs and the first five elements and then maybe 16 symbols at a given offset. And connect that and then have an external block of metadata associated with that sequence of sequences. That subset of sequences. So yeah, I think we get a lot of it. Then let’s then let’s call that a different name. Let’s call that text with metadata or something you want to make up so that it distinguish it from the first definition that you gave, which was a linguistics one. And from the field of linguistics, I don’t know if we got any in the in the meeting right now, but that’s so we’ve got two different meanings now. Can we just, can we call them by two different names or are we going to confuse ourselves by calling them all texts over and over again?

Frode Hegland: I think I think we have to remember that the reason we’re having this discussion today, we’re not having a specific meeting on the philosophy of what text is and in isolation, you know, having in this community. And Fabienne brought it up, as I understand, to find out, are we still about texts? What is this community about it? It’s actually called the Future Text Lab, which is one thing. So the thing is, I hope Marc Andreessen will join us. He may get that time wrong. I see Alan is coming in, which is good. Adam Warren is coming in. He thought it was the other time, so I sent out two documents to the community this week. One of them was the intent of the Lab wich you really need to have a look at and tell me if you want to be included or  Not.

Frode Hegland: Because if I don’t have an email back saying yes, please, then I won’t do. Because I don’t want to be pushy. And I’ve been asked by Ismail to give a list. Now some of you have said yes, so that’s good. The other one was a document on the new Egyptian Museum and the Fabian. Can I transition to that now and see how it holds in context with your big question? Okay, cool. So the thing with that is so while Brandel can’t be here today, he has a conference he has to go to, but he is the one who turned my head on this. And I remember Doug saying that someone said, Doug, you know, you’re just a dreamer. And he said, Dreaming is hard work. The difference between a fantasy and a dream is that a dream attempts to achieve something beyond linear obviousness that can be turned into a reality, whereas fantasy exists on its own, which is where we have fantasy movies and books and so on. So in this context, what I tried to do over the weekend, so my good friend Ismail Sahgal then, who was the founder of the Modern Library of Alexandria, former vice president of the World Bank, he has 50 honorary degrees, in other words, very academic, very connected, and a super, super nice uncle to my son, Edgar. He said that.

Chris Gutteridge: They.

Frode Hegland: Are now building the world’s largest archaeological museum in Egypt. It’s going to be within a mile of the great pyramids of Giza. And he says that based on the first document, I sense we should consider as a community to pitch, to develop some kind of an AR or VR thing for them. He said no more. So I wrote this document that I sent around trying to really just be a bit thought provoking. I will read out a few highlights from it. Actually, I.Think. I think. Right. I think Adam’s trying to come in, so. No, I’m not going to do that. That’s a bit too artificial. Alan Are you here, by the way?

Alan Laidlaw: I am, if you can. You hear me?

Frode Hegland: Yeah. Your audio?

Alan Laidlaw: Yes. Yes, I’m calling from my phone.

Frode Hegland: No, that’s fine. Right. So here is the idea. You’re standing outside. When you put your wherever you are in the world, you put on your Oculus. Let’s make it simple. Stay with the Oculus headset, and then you see yourself standing outside this Egyptian museum, which is absolutely beautiful, the physical building on the outside. And then you step in. Of course, you can walk around the museum and look at things as though you’re there. It’s kind of an obvious implementation of VR. You can then also choose to take any object you come across into the augmented room. I call it the augmented room to be both VR and all of them. And in this room, this is where it gets really interesting because in our community we have discussed now over the last few weeks, where do we put stuff? So the first thing that this person will notice going into this room is that this is just in my thought scenario. Please, none of this is dictating. I’m just going to pretend it exists, right? See this huge timeline in front of them, which is very much like a mural. Adams coming in. Let’s just wait a second. Hi, Adam. So I was just about to do a little verbal explanation of what’s in the Egyptian Museum document that I sent. So you’re in this augmented room and in front of you is a huge timeline mural. And in this and I’m already taking a lot of the stuff that people in the community has built. So you have first of all, the gamut is about three and a half thousand years of Egyptian history. But what you can do, you can fold it in different ways, like we’ve seen in the Twitter thread. The different layers are different subject, so you can choose to have even the weather or fashion or when they build pyramids or dynasties or names or whatever. Each have different threads. If there’s something you don’t find interesting, you pinch it and you throw it on the floor and it becomes gray and it goes to the bottom. So it becomes really interactive. And a really key thing for this community is you can zoom out in either direction outside of this gamut, because I’m not interested in making a ghetto.

Frode Hegland: I used to think of CD-ROMs as being information ghettos. We should not make VR ghettos, so this has to be fully integrated with open access, wiki data, Wikipedia and so on. So if you want to scroll all the way back to where the African plate hit the European plates and basically pushed Egypt into existence, you should be able to do that. Right. So all of these are issues that we’ve discussed many times. So that’s one of the things. Another thing is there will be a mural, not a mural. A what do you call a diorama? You know, so there’s a table that has that one of the pyramids and has the center where you’re in. And then you find out that obviously you can make it smaller, bigger. If you make it big enough. Suddenly you’re inside one of the pyramids. You walk around. You make it small. And you can see the entire globe. You can scale thing. You can move them around. You can do all these things. So the interesting thing then becomes you can touch, let’s say, one of the pyramids and throw it against the timeline. And then because every item here has to know what they are, it will then highlight the history of that pyramid. So similarly, anything on the timeline, you can throw it because I’m thinking throwing is a bit like drag and drop in this environment.

Frode Hegland: It’s not a nice word throwing, but that’s how I’m thinking about it. So you can do things back and forth and then you can save these environments. You can open up academic documents. Let’s say you’re a university student, read the document and kind of the waste we have already been talking about. And hopefully if we work on the architecture of how things are described, you can open up, let’s say three documents. All the pictures go up here on a specific wall and then you can start doing connections again. One of the fun things I thought about was that in this timeline, there are a few places. There are thin slits like doors, and if you walk through that, you enter a computer game metaverse for that time period. So that’s very much outside the work that we are doing. But imagine that some of these companies that have made amazing computer games for Egypt, that they donate lots of resources. So just imagine for fun, you know, you have this mural in front of your timeline, you walk through it and suddenly you are there. And ideally the things you come across, if it’s an object that is in the museum, you can pick it up and take it back in with you.

Bob Horn: To take it back with you into the main museum. How to glass your Oculus?

Frode Hegland: No. Well, this is all Oculus headset. This is all virtual reality. It’s all ready to go. And so the thing is, for this piece, I’m not trying to be realistic. I’m not trying to think of text. I’m trying to think of how different things can be put together. And immediately when talking to Ismail about this, he said that might be problematic because if they have specific scans of specific objects, the intellectual property comes into it of what knowledge they would want you to take out of the museum. Because one thing could be you find a specific jewel and it has maybe a gemstone on it. And if that is, let’s say. Well, anyway, if the museum knows the composition of the stones on this. These are knowledge objects. So you should be able to throw that on the map. And then they’ll zoom out and show these are the possible locations these this could have come from. Right. So obviously I’m talking crazy levels of system understanding of multiple things. It’s kind of just to kick off a little bit of thinking so we can see if any of this is doable. And then, of course, at the end of this session, in this script, the user kind of stores a few views of this, lots of things happening, folds it down, goes into a meeting in another room by another company and is still able to open up and show an aspect of this. Maybe not everything.

Bob Horn: That’s a beautiful, beautiful vision. And. Well, and we should. I think we should do it. I’ve known Ismael. Not very well. I went to a conference there six or seven years ago at the museum. And even then he had a virtual reality room. Yeah. He like.

Frode Hegland: A cave? That’s right.

Bob Horn: Okay. Yeah, right. A cave. Which. Which. I had the opportunity of walking around in there in Egypt rather than in at the University of Illinois. So he’s he’s a good he’s a good guy and a serious guy. And and Egypt is putting money behind this. And I think we should. You know, make a plan and go for it. It’s beautiful vision. I love you. I love you. I love throwing a pyramid.

Frode Hegland: Thank you, Peter. And then Fabian. But just really briefly, I looked at the budget for this. The physical budget is half a billion dollars. I don’t think they have a lot of money, if any, for us. But I do think that if we present something coherent in a way that this organizers can understand, then we should be able to get sponsors. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be involved with the greatest museum in the world in a virtual reality space that isn’t just second life? Peter.

Peter Wasilko: It’s one of the things I’d like to be able to do is pick up an artifact and throw it at a globe of the earth and then see on the globe a line showing all of the locations that that artifact had been over time since its discovery. And I might notice that, say, I picked up a bracelet and I throw it at the globe and I notice that the line. Race is out and it hits Chicago. Then I want to grab the globe and the timeline together and smoosh them together. And when I smoosh them together, that would then show me on the timeline when it was that the bracelet was in Chicago, and I might see that it was at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933. Then I could take that and throw it back at the museum graphic and see all of the other artifacts that are at the museum that had traveled to Chicago to be exhibited at the 1933 World’s Fair.

Frode Hegland: That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m dreaming of. Thanks, Peter. Fabian.

Fabien Benetou: So yeah, I’m down to it. When there is no effort to put in initially, I’m down to pretty much anything as long as it’s aligned with my value. So for now, yeah, I’m in that. That’s interesting. For me, it’s exploring your world of knowledge. So yeah, definitely interested. I purposely will not invest any effort until there is. Bit more commitment to things like this because like everybody else. Few other things to do. And I’m going to sound like an idiot here. But after what is text, I’m going to ask what’s the role of the museum? Because I think a little bit like the library now, that has radically changed now that we can do anything and everything online and in some ways better and other way, of course, worse. But but I think that begs that question, because I also personally helped bit the House of European history in Brussels, and we did some photogrammetry of some artifacts. So we can we can extract, let’s say, items out and in pretty good quality, yet in quality that is still usable and manipulate the whole, including with the quest. So I know a bit the process, but and that brings new opportunity that, for example, with the virtual museum you don’t have a catalog downstairs that nobody is going to care. You can actually browse through anything and everything you you actually can give it to people so that they can manipulate. You can’t do that with a normal piece. So it really begs that question, what what is a museum and what does this museum wants to do? And finally, for the half a billion, I would suggest whether there is the Assassin’s Creed team, the video game, not just for the game itself, but there are some videos about historians reacting to Assassin’s Creed so that they can give this perspective. So this type of column for those kind of temples, that’s not the right era. Well, the opposite is actually pretty positive most of the time, because I think what would be a miss would be to. The one the one thing that we all can do really well is to throw you in a crate in another environment, let’s say, compared to where you put the headset, you’re somewhere else. And and it means when I was a kid in Britain to see where I come from, we have a medieval fair, but actually the whole town, it’s a tiny thing, 10,000 inhabitants.

Fabien Benetou: So the whole town becomes we’re back with road back in time and you can decide who you want to be. You can be somebody. You can be a beggar on the street. You can be the king, or you can be like building or riding horses or whatnot, but you will be thrown back in time. So it’s kind of impressive and I think that’s really one of the biggest value of VR. It’s cheap to go back in time, or would you be a king or queen or a beggar or whoever you want to be? So I think that that’s probably one of the most natural way to do it. How can you be somebody else in another social context, economic code, etc., but not in a game way, not Assassin’s Creed, but in a way that you learn. Because in Assassin’s Creed you get points for basically killing people. I mean, it’s a bit of a shortcut, but it’s not much deeper than this as far as I can tell. So yeah, how, how what’s the kind of knowledge you would get out of actually being a pharaoh, let’s say, and how that can be done through the knowledge that is out of the museum.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. That part of being there is absolutely phenomenal. And also in a way, it is very, very obvious and I think it should absolutely be supported. I think people are interested in the metaverse should build that. Absolutely wonderful. You asked what is a museum in VR? And I’m really interested and glad to hear you have real experience of that. In this case, the museum itself. I’m not very interested in I’m interested in what I currently call the augmented room, whatever we end up calling it, because if you have in that room, you have a timeline, you have a map table type thing. You have opportunity for not one, but several mural’s images. You have a way to get in and out the traditional documents. Then we are talking about the stuff we’ve talked about in general. It’s just that we’re being given a case study. So the fact that it happens to be about Egypt is almost irrelevant. Because all the problems we might solve about how the map connects to the timeline and all of this stuff should be transferable to other knowledge. And that is why it’s so important to me that there are no limits in the sense of what data is accessible. When you do the timeline, like I said, you should be able to go down back a couple of million years. It shouldn’t be only what the museum wants to show. The museum shows the curated bits, but if it’s on wiki data or whatever, open data. Put it in there.

Frode Hegland: So it becomes essentially a could. So imagine if we actually got some funding to do to get some actual programming time done and actual time thinking. Imagine in a year launching this thing. We all agree it could be. Quite amazing, right? Because we focus on.

Chris Gutteridge: No, I’m not inspired at all. Yeah, I think we all agree when I’m here. I think it sounds an awful lot like wanking with data. Sorry, the whole put something on a timeline, put something on a map. It’s like, I do not need to put on a headset and go to room for this. I can do that with a web browser. I do not need to do stupid Billy K Dick bad movies waving my hands around and throwing things, get them on timelines. I can click and I am just I mean, I do not understand the need for any of this yet and going to I am friendly critical friend rather than trying to shoot it all down. But all I’m hearing is taking time and location data and making a really inconvenient user interface to it.

Frode Hegland: Right. Okay.

Bob Horn: Everyone will go, wow. And then kids will mess around to it for 5 minutes to go to the next room. Unless you can do something where you can actually generate new understanding and you’ve missed something here which made me annoyed, which is you said, I don’t care what museum is the museum and a collection or an archive, a different that a museum is there for public understanding. And it’s not the same as saying here is the data, it is a curated collection. It’s a bit like the difference between a dictionary and a novel.

Frode Hegland: But hang on, Chris, if you look two things. If you guys had actually read the document, I sent this one.

Bob Horn: Wss at work this morning?

Frode Hegland: Yeah. No, I know. Hey, I didn’t mean it like like a slight like that, but there is a part of it in there that does have a guide. So you can say, what is this? And then there is a curated guide that says, in the context of the museum, this is so and so. So it’s a little bit of a theory, which is why I’m hoping Adam may join us, the other Adam. So, yes, I mean, not everything was in here, but when it comes. The other thing and again, for the for the rest of the community, Chris and I are actually very close friends. So please ignore our tone at the moment because you haven’t used an Oculus lately. The previous VR I think is not very relevant. So you are little bit not feeling the same thing because one thing that was done in the community, first by Brandel and then by Adam, we took one of Bob Horn’s murals as in we they did put it in a room that had nothing else in it. And all you could do in the first iteration, you could pull it towards you and move it about that in itself without anything fancy. It’s absolutely effing mind blowing because if you had really meant what you said in the beginning of this, which is what I believe my entire life until January, you would be walking around with blinkers, right? I have a 13 inch monitor. I know it’s working so when you can have bigger monitors, but the difference between having this world view and having the entire thing, it is so different. You have to feel it. And what I’m talking about, Mark Anderson, who is not here right now, for whatever reason, he got annoyed with me and felt that the document I wrote was full of hyperbole. I don’t know what he meant by that, and I’d like to understand, but the point is, at this stage, all we’re trying to do is just throw all kinds of dreamy things. And Chris, I am very glad you’re here because your perspective of once we have some dreamy things, a lot of it will be wonky bullshit. There’s no question. But I don’t think we’re at the stage of filtering that out yet.

Chris Gutteridge: I think it’s what it feels like, what will look cool to investors, not what will actually help people generate new understanding. And I think that for me is the whole point of something like this is to get it. And it’s potentially one of those things where one person in the right place at the right time will make all the difference because you can have all of the technology and garbage in, garbage out. So I think it’s worth almost coming up with the how does someone go? I’ve never seen it from that perspective before. And for me, that’s the thing. How do you give someone a perspective that they that they couldn’t get without this?

Frode Hegland: I mean, I see your hand. But just a little more jousting with Chris.

Bob Horn: No, I’m happy to.

Frode Hegland: One of the things that I came up with in my fantastic imagination, I say in quotes and joking, walking into a timeline, suddenly you’re there. You can see the stage of the pyramids right there. Not every step of the timeline, only curated little dots. Right. You can’t do that anywhere else. And the whole thing is, why does a museum exist? It’s to go and see stuff. This allows you to go and see stuff in many, many different contexts. And this goes back to the text question to then produce a knowledge artifacts which you can share with other people. There will be a PDF at the end of it. Fabian take over before it says too much nonsense.

Fabien Benetou: It’s so. Yes. If it’s. How would you say this data wanking or something like this? Yeah, it’s not worth it. But also I want to say this. I think the opportunity that also, regardless of being Egypt or another, it doesn’t matter so much. But I was I was just this weekend at an exhibit here in Brazil on Aboriginal art from Australia called the Before Time Began. It was a beautiful exhibit. It was very well organised. It’s very, quite interesting, but it was also so damn boring. It was also so nothing special that the artefacts was there as the creation I’m sure was amazing. I don’t even have the knowledge to judge it. To be fair, it was quite interesting. But it was. It felt when I know that the tools we have or the toys for however you want to call it the information we have its own wiki data wikipedia. I was it was disgusting in a way. It was excellent, but it was poor. It was not good enough. And I say this also with a half a billion, the amount mentioned initially because I know the museum there, the entrance was like €21 or something of this was expensive with nothing crazy. And I know I did not go.

Fabien Benetou: Let’s at the end of my visit to talk to the curator of the museum, to propose my skill, because I know if I propose my skill, I need to propose a bill. And I know that, for example, doing the photogrammetry or doing the programming or all this, it is quite expensive and you need a proper team. It’s not just like a 5 minutes game or something, and so it’s very involving. So I have this kind of tension between the potential, the goal, the mission, what what could be done. But somehow we don’t. And I one of the biggest bottleneck, let’s say we we have with data, for example, and we have the timeline, all this is easy. I mean, it’s not easy, but we can do it. No problem. But what what’s usually the bottleneck for all of this kind of project or 3D models? Most places don’t have 3D models and we get stuck in 2D, we get stuck in text, we get stuck maybe in video, but in actual 3D, we have to force it out and we can pull it extruding, but it’s, it’s ugly. So that’s why I mentioned Assassin’s Creed. It’s just one example of a historically inspired, let’s say, video game is because I think in terms of assets and then of production, in terms of skills, that’s kind of the place to be.

Fabien Benetou: If I were if somebody if tomorrow you tell me, Oh, you’re in charge of the project and you delete it. That’s the team I would want. They don’t necessarily have the same view on what text is or our perspective, but in terms of managing a library of the asset generating and the creative unit, I think that would be the way. And then again the, the, the, the answer a bit to Chris’s point on. Yeah. And then what like what do we actually learn from it. But I think that’s where I would see the value of the museum and its curators is how can we actually go from somebody an an imaginary visitor, let’s say, who knows very little some connections to this or that topic to actually becoming an expert in the field. And it’s a bit idiotic to say, but I think that’s kind of the goal is you go to the museum, you want to learn about the topic, you’re not going to give an Egyptologist in three hour session. But how can we raise the data?

Alan Laidlaw: I don’t know if anybody else is about to talk.

Chris Gutteridge: But. I’ll just go on the on the.

Peter Wasilko: Record there’s a.

Fabien Benetou: Could go on I could go on and on.

Peter Wasilko: As to the.

Fabien Benetou: Factors. But personally, I think it’s a distraction.

Chris Gutteridge: What is?

Alan Laidlaw: Trying to pitch and create a VR Museum solution for some of the reasons that were already listed. But I don’t. Know, I just, I, I think that the idea, the.The imagined solution experience.Sounds, sounds great, but the getting.To there actually involves a whole lot more.Than even just the technology, right? So it’s a thing that if it were. Seriously considered by the group. I do think it would be a distraction. I don’t think that. I think it could be a one or. The other kind of situation.

Frode Hegland: A distraction from what?

Alan Laidlaw: A distraction from What is Currently being worked on. The and I don’t just mean in the sense of the demo, I don’t mean in the sense of deliverables. I mean the. Trying to. Unpack a core problem that is of interest to the p eople who are on the call. And then and then. From there. Sort of working out. To. Something. That is closer to a product is an entirely different mindset. Than Pitching To try and make A museum type experience and everything that’s involved there. It just seems like There. They don’t overlap. And I know that I can. There’s a whole. Lot more to the museum as far as like the requirements. That would be the team that would be needed. The time that would be needed. The. I find that it just. Seems like.

Frode Hegland: I find it really difficult. The dialogue in the group, because we meet twice a week, which is quite a lot of course, but then, you know, people come in and out as we can and there is very Little Other than posting some things on Twitter interaction in the meantime. For instance, the document that I wrote about this, not a lot of people have had a chance to read it. Fair enough. But when you say this, Alan, I’m not talking about going in and reproducing just a museum. That’s kind of obvious. They can do that if they want to. I don’t think they need us for that. But what I call the augmented room basically has all the elements we’ve been discussing since January. The only difference here is that instead of us flailing about about what the topic the use case is about, it’s someone learning the history of Egypt. So I think it actually solves all our problems. You know, instead of being general, it’s specific and it has this.

Alan Laidlaw: I haven’t read the document that you sent. So I’ll I’ll I Was just giving you my impression from what I’ve been hearing But I’ll read the. Document. If it does line up, then I’m all for it because.

Frode Hegland: Well, the thing is, your concern, just like Chris, you’re being negative from a very interesting and intelligent perspective because even when I talk to Ismail, he’s talking about intellectual property and what the museum wants and all of that stuff. What we want is to augment people learning, solving problems and thinking that’s not necessarily the same as the museum. So it is kind of a sneaky way of trying to do both. And you may be right, it may be that the museum only wants something very specific and this augmented room may not be amazing.

Peter Wasilko: I’d like to make a couple of points about museums in general. I’ve noticed that they’re having something of an identity crisis, and it goes back quite some time back in, I think the early 1990s. I saw the first instance of it at the Museum of Natural History in New York City, and there was an exhibit called Expedition, and it was supposed to capture all the excitement of museum exhibition, studying things. But it started to get contemporary politics injected into the exhibit, and it started to lose touch with reality. And the example is they had a little theater and it had the story of the island flying frog. And you went into this little theater and you sat down just basically a little round cylinder, walled off section of the museum floor with enough seating for maybe 20 people to be sitting. And you watch a little video. And the video started telling the story of MIPS Island, which was somewhere off the South Carolina banks. And someone who traveled to the island discovered these wonderful flying frogs, and they had this exciting theme, throwing frogs in the air, frogs in the trees, frogs the flapping in the breeze. It’s the meets island flying frog and everybody’s getting all excited. But then it told the story about how some developer wanted to come and build an amusement park on the island that would have destroyed the frogs habitat and how they were able to get emergency legislation through.

Peter Wasilko: It goes through this whole thing and they save the frogs at the end saying, Oh, wonderful. And as I’m exiting the theater at the end of the presentation, I notice a little plaque on the side with some small print. And the small print was this is actually a representation of a composite of the experiences of many different endangered species. There actually is no island flying frog, but it’s representative of the general area. But that was just like a little back door footnote that 90% of the people going through that exhibit wouldn’t have seen. More recently in New York City, we’ve had exhibits on the science of Star Wars, and I’m sorry, there was no science. It was pure BS. The museums, at least the ones in New York City. I can’t speak for the rest of the world and hopefully Cairo hasn’t gotten out of the slippery slope. But the museum staff start to see their job as being an entertainment institution and not an educational institution. So they’ll bring in all these bogus exhibits with just the most tangential connection to the underlying subject matter, because in their minds, they don’t think that reality is interesting enough for the museum patrons to be able to generate sales. So you come in, you get animated dinosaurs and the dinosaur models are cool and they generate a lot of you come to the Boston Museum of Science to see the dinosaurs, but the dinosaur models aren’t accurate, according to the latest understanding of what dinosaurs are.

Peter Wasilko: One good thing in VR, we can update those models on the fly as we learn new things about them. But when you add a giant pneumatic animated T-Rex stretching their head around with roaring sounds that were lifted from lions and slowed down slightly with some sound effects, I didn’t bother to tell you how they did the sound effects to do it. You’re just supposed to imagine that you saw what dinosaurs looked like when you really didn’t. Same problem down at Epcot Center at Disney World. It was originally conceived to inform, entertain and inspire were the three planks of Epcot and then Disney Company. About halfway through, I guess maybe it was the nineties ish. They started bringing in cartoon characters to boost sales and they totally jettisoned the educational mission. And instead now you have Guardians of the Galaxy roller coaster ride being put in, and the first thing the Living Sees was a wonderful pavilion. Originally it was just an aquarium and a representation of what a future sea based alpha might look like. And then they replaced it with Nemo and friends. So you had a real aquarium with a theater animated. We get we get the we get the entertainment and it’s terrible. Yeah. If we can do anything to get things back, to be more grounded in reality, in seriousness, it would be a tremendous service to all of humanity.

Frode Hegland: Right?

Peter Wasilko: But the museums themselves are in a crisis and they need to do a serious reexamining of what their purpose is.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. That’s a fair point. Absolutely.

Peter Wasilko: Off of my soapbox.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. Fabian Chris, you have to click the button with the hand thing.

Fabien Benetou: I’m ahead of you there. So I think one one way may be to answer Allen’s warning that this we might be led astray to something interesting. But that’s not the core of this group is also what would we delegate? Let’s imagine that we get such a project. We might not want to do everything. We might not want to do photogrammetry. We might not want to program some games or I don’t know what. So I think that’s another way to answer it is what would be the core differentiating value that this group would provide compared to the team that made Assassin’s Creed or or another one who made whichever museum is next to you? Beside a love of tech besides some understanding of the value of it and maybe the value of text in VR, I think that might might help because I think, to be honest, that even if there is such a proposal made and it doesn’t go anywhere, it might still ask the right question. So it might be indeed a good exercise. And the topic indeed not necessarily the point, but what would be the actual added value of manipulating text in VR or having a timeline or things that a typical games to you who would take on such a job would not care about? For example, maybe that’s another way to see it.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. Chris Just on that point, Fabian, let’s put a pen on that and have a proper discussion of what we would do different. So Chris, please go. But Fabian definitely thinking about what you said.

Chris Gutteridge: So I would say I still think at all times anything with new tech has to be more than shiny. And it’s I think the key thing is how to. Do something at least as good as without it. Not just whiz bang, but there’s a couple of things. That. Randomly that I’ve thought of while we’re talking about this. And I’m just going to because I just randomly will fire off any time someone says something with that. Oh one is we have a researcher who Kurt Martinez who does stuff about 3D imagery.Of Historical items, specifically three like that are too expensive to let anyone touch or mess with very much. And he puts them under a dome and photographs them with light from every cardinal angle in such a way they can then recreate it. So you can basically walk up to it, have it on a computer screen, and move a light around and get a strong sense of a 3D shape of something like a stele or something like Steely Stellar, the big engraved things repeated and things like that. So he might be a fun person to talk to because he’s got a lot of experience in computer science and museums and digitizing three, the 3D, digitizing old master paintings and things like that, and the issues around giving a. Computerized experience, the things that are more than an gbps scan of a flat surface. But the second one was thinking about. Ways you can get 3D in value in other ways. And one of the things I’ve heard of being done is doing the opposite of virtual reality, and that is 3D using 3D models to print off things to hand to a child so that there’s no way they can touch the original. But here’s the shape of the thing.

Chris Gutteridge: Here’s the one in the here’s the one in the tub cabinet that you can’t touch. But this is the ideally the weight as well. And oh, you see how that bit goes into there and things. But the other one, and this is slightly more matter was you were talking about thing related data. And I think in history one of the most interesting things is but what else was going on? Because I think we you tend to study things and most people study things in a little unit and you do your unit of history and you do the Second World War or you do the First World War or you do this pit period and places. And that’s not what history really is. It’s all of those things interacting with each other over time. And for me, one of the most fascinatingly odd things I once found out was that Deadwood and the kind of classic era of the Wild West and Bill Hickok and the whole cowboy legends are contemporary with the time the Sherlock Holmes novels were set. And this may sound stupidly obvious, but they’re two different worlds. Even though Sherlock Holmes is fictional, the London he lived in was the London of When the Wild West was happening. And for me, that kind of understanding and I never relearned American history except in units because of British. And so understanding how all the world West led to the First World War in spite of this huge gap in mind. It was a big gap in my understanding, and World War One is the modern era, and the Wild West is the modern day. There’s only about 30 years between them, and I’ve lived longer than that now. And understanding that there were people from the Wild West who were in the First World War and things, and that connection is something I think you could do with letting people explore, scratch and itch and go and look. And being able to go off road is effectively in history is really interesting by being what other things are going on. And the final thought I had was you’re talking about things and almost having a lens. So being able to look at, you’re looking at something through the perspective of. One the economic view. But what is the the folly of this all of a sudden? There’s lots of different strands to history all interacting.

Frode Hegland: Chris Yes, sorry. Absolutely. That’s the key thing. And that’s why I said in the beginning that the museum is allowed to curate the basic timeline, but you should be able to bring in absolutely any available data that you can so that you can do exactly that. So thank you for highlighting that crucial bit. Bob, do you want to do yours or should we address the point that Fabian brought up? Where do you want to be? In the sequence. The question was.

Bob Horn: What? I’ve been. Let’s see if I. Yeah, I’ve got my I’ve been my internet has been down. So I. So let them go ahead. I’m not sure that I’m relevant at the moment.

Frode Hegland: All right. So the question Fabian asked was, what would we offer that isn’t just a game studio, what they would offer or a VR company or a scanning company or something like that. Is that right, Fabian? So when, when I wrote. Yeah. So when I do that. Yeah. And also write to that or demo to that or image to that. Because when I wrote the thing that I wrote, I tried to go into dream mode and not just be about everything has to be about visual matter or any of that nonsense. Of course there are aspects of that. So I probably underplayed what we do in this group, which is about text. But, you know, having worked on these different documents, which you may consider fluff or not. Over the last few months, problems become more and more apparent. So if we choose an aspect of this and I think, for instance, if we choose only to make the most incredible timeline and then maybe a map later and then the most rudimentary access to academic documents in and out. Just that will be amazing. We should, as a community, choose what to focus on. There’s no question about that. We can’t do everything. I mean, right now, I think it’s good to dream about everything, but we have to decide where we’re going to go. And I really think that where we are different. What? Peter No, we’re not going to have a command line interface in VR. Go and get an Oculus. Just no, young man. No. Anyway, we do have to agree. I mean, as an additional thing. Yes, but I’ve got so many things going on here. Yeah. Okay, Bob.

Bob Horn: Well, first, I appreciate your sending me the document over computer down. I couldn’t find your message. It may have. I don’t know. So second. Second thing. I’ve done three different major. Arrangements and analyses of text which have become useful to people. Does sometimes in some of them, several hundred thousand that we can document because they paid for it. And the reason that I found that we made progress was to work on some subject matter. So the subject matter itself doesn’t matter so much because subject matters are pretty, pretty much the same around the world in at one level of abstraction and analysis. But when you actually work on a subject matter like Egyptian history, you get all the challenges or many of the challenges that you that you will need to face in any subject matter and and to work that actually working on it is the actual getting started. And I think the other thing that it’s wonderful. This conversation is wonderful in the sense of visioning. But the. But the. But the. The. But to me. One has to realize that we’re not going to do everything at once. We’re going to we’re going to start with, well, one thing, maybe a time timeline’s good one to start with or maybe something else, maybe a document that that that the museum produces. Maybe maybe it’s all the all the little messages next to all the objects in the museum, for example, is another set of text that one might start with to do to learn to learn how to manipulate them in virtual reality. So, you know, that’s real. And we don’t know which order which order is best. We just got to get started. And then that’s and it’s having this data and I have to if I sound a little urgent, is I’m facing this same thing in another project. I can’t I can’t get people to actually work on it, work on a subject matter. But it’s taking me two months to get that to happen, to even get started on it, because then we learn things from trying to do something with it. Yeah.

Frode Hegland: Bob, I so wholeheartedly agree with you. I agree with you. And Rafael, I see your hand. So on this subject, can we think about this till Friday? And if we come back on Friday and we say even if just thinking of back of my head, I’ve decided this is absolutely wrong. Fair enough. It’s been a week of thinking, but at the same time, if you do have the time and interest just to write a paragraph or to mock something up. And then we can start fighting over what aspect we think we should work on. That I think might be very productive. And Alan, do you agree that if we take an open approach and focus on the interactions, the tools and the knowledge generation, the fact that it is about Egyptian history is a nice added. Bonus rather than something that could pull us down a rabbit hole. Alan, what do you think? Look, Alan’s making coffee. Raphael, over to you.

Rafael Nepó: Okay. Let’s see where I begin. I agree with with Bob. I think getting started is taking the first step is usually the hardest one. But after that we start to gain momentum on things and thinking about. Vr and Egypt. I think thinking about the architecture of the space is where things start to have a lot of possibilities. And when I talk about the architecture, I’m talking about the VR architecture where we’re going to be inside. I think that’s more important than thinking. Of the Interactions, like, how do I see this file or this map or this timeline? Because if people are going to be in this environment, then the environment takes more importance than the interactions. And from from architecture, just being in a space, thinking about the Library of Alexandria or these grandiose architectures, the architecture, the architecture by itself puts you in a mood and the feeling and the way of of interacting with things. So I think that the environment we create is as equal or more important than the content that is within it. Because if we’re creating VR for this, this huge place and we have something that it’s underwhelming, then it kind of defeats the purpose of the VR archive. So I think the architecture is something that has to be thought about, and I wanted to quickly try to, if I could have 5 minutes. It has to do with sex and VR and things. We were talking on the email. I have a Couple of slides here that I just wanted to show this this quick. Concept that I thought about. Let me share my screen. So it’s quite simple, but it requires a different kind of method of thinking. But we’re already. We already have the the base to understand it. So it has to do with the idea of equip ables and speaking directly from from from games. So basically if we accept everything is text, even photos, videos, songs, apps, everything ends up being text. As a foundation we start to think of text as building blocks that you can use as a foundation and build upon. So here, this is a very quick example of a game called Diablo three. And the first thing is on the left, this is my character and you can see it has a power of 1517 and it has no equipment in it. So it’s I don’t have I’m not using anything. And as I go to the right, I start equipping these different items, which makes my character strong. So right here I have 4500, and then the next one I have 6600. And it goes all the way up to the max where I have this complete set of equipments and my character is very strong and based on the basic character, my character is ten times stronger, it’s still the same character, but using these different equipments, my character gets stronger and stronger. So if we think about text as the base and we can equip things to text, make text stronger, better, augmented, whatever word you want to call it, we start to get new possibilities for text.

Rafael Nepó: So in this case, in Diablo three, I can have seven pieces of equipment that that make medium change to my character. I can equip four accessories that give small changes, and I can equip two weapons that give me big changes. So if we think in context of text, small changes to text would be maybe a change of font, a little bit of metadata, author info I cover, things like that medium changes the things that we discuss on a on a weekly basis here. And the big changes are things like the text knows about itself or GPT three. You can generate text based on different, different algorithms that you define. So if we think of a text file as the base plus these extensions, augmentations enhancements, plugins, add ons, whatever you want to call it, it’s things that you add on to the base text. Then we get a package file. So this packaged file would work like a mac application where a program is a package and inside the package you have all of the contents of that package. So when we think about text, this package will contain instructions on how the text would behave depending on the context that the text is going to be inserted. And it also separates content from presentation.

Rafael Nepó: It’s nondestructive to the text that the PCD is still the foundation and it’s going to open differently based on the app. So if you open a text in VR, it’s going to open one way. If you open the same text package in word, it’s going to open the way word wants it to work because the first line, it contains instructions on how to behave based on the context, and you can also have different layouts. So maybe this package that contains the text can be visualized in a book form or in a web format or in a printable format. And we can also have different display options in this text package that can have different languages, different colors, different fonts. And the package can also be collaborative and nondestructive. So I can have annotations, highlights and comments. And since this is a package, I’m not having this highlight or this highlight, I’m having this highlight and this highlight. It just keeps complimenting. So I’m able to collaborate on this package with other people and have frozen annotations or atoms, annotations, and all of this complements the base, which is text. So this is a different idea that I thought about when we think about text because it from the way that I’m thinking about this, it solves a lot of the problems that we have based on either applications or different environments Or Formats or collaboration. If we start thinking of add ons that we add to text, then we’re able to to grow text based on any kind of either industry or platform or environment. That text is supported. And since text is the base of everything, it just it makes sense to have a packaged format for text and the way to. All about. This would be having a kind of a parsing language that we can give instructions to the text on. For example, if the title on page two is bold, I’m not adding old formatting to the text. I’m giving instructions to make the text bold in that specific word. So it’s the main text file is unchangeable. It’s always it’s always going to be that. But whatever changes you make, you make, it’s going to generate a second, a separate file that will live in the package with instructions to change the text. The base text. That’s that’s what I had to share really quickly.

Frode Hegland: Opens up a lot of interesting questions. I think we’ll need to chew on that for a bit. There’s been a comment from Chris in the text chat already. Fabian. 

Rafael Nepó: So Hypercard. I love Hypercard.

Frode Hegland: It’s yeah, that is definitely not a bad, bad comment. But yeah.

Chris Gutteridge: Too young to remember HyperCard. That is.

Rafael Nepó: True. That is. That is true. And I guess Christopher doesn’t know about my, my main project, but once I found out about HyperCard, I discovered that what I’m doing nowadays has been done, you know, when I was born.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. Over to you, Fabian, while we consider what Rafael has presented.

Fabien Benetou: So the two quick things to note that in others know that but I don’t have a mac so that that’s my immediate comment so I can’t get excited because it sounds like I couldn’t participate. I’m not saying it’s not possible to do otherwise, but I think every time we do this, even if it’s just an example, then it means maybe other people don’t get excited. And to my bigger point is also I have a bias. So I was I joined here because of what thanks to Brandel. But like me, he tends to be web based first. And it’s also a perspective that I think we had a few times that and it’s not I don’t know if it’s normal. We tend to think of files and files with an operating system, but I think a lot of things I don’t want to say most, but a lot of the tasks we do are web based and it doesn’t mean any any all of this could still be compatible by being a web application or multiple web application or running on different servers. But but it’s just. Yes, same it’s it’s it’s how easily could it be imagined or thought of as a web based thing? And also because if it’s web based, there is no specific limitation. So that’s my immediate reaction. And something maybe a little bit deeper is last week or two weeks ago, I don’t know, we started to discuss briefly about Code Mirror, which is a Web based programming editor. It’s mostly targeting programmers, but it’s a bit like Visual Studio code. But the nice thing is it has it’s quite extensible. So it has widgets, for example, you can select the type of code or with a type and then you can have a widget to. I’m wondering how if the the widget view could be thought of as bubbles? And a quick comment on that. Fabian, I didn’t mean to pose this as a mac way of doing it. I’m web first as well.

Rafael Nepó: You can think of this as an alternative. I guess if HTML is the structure, the content, even before it’s HTML, you have text and then text, html would be an add on to text and then CSS would be an add on to text and then JavaScript would be an add on to text instead of a language by itself. So you could think of it as web based. If you just think of decorating the structure, even HTML is a structure language. If you separate HTML from the content itself, it’s something that attaches to text instead of becomes an HTML file.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is a very interesting discussion obviously related to markdown and formats, a lot of other things just to make it really, really clear for the community. I think we agree. I most certainly think that the work we do has to be open. All of it. I happen to own reader and author. Sorry, it is my native, but that’s my tiny little loss making commercial side of things. All the document formats, all the standards have to be open. And I think that even if we were to do this pitch to the Egyptian Museum people, we have to make it clear that it is 100% web based. And if they want to start owning stuff, we will just have to explain to them why that is a very, very bad idea. Most of the information about these artifacts are readily available anyway, and they really should contribute to an open thing. The reason I’m so excited about this, one of the first features of text which I held at the university where I was a teacher with Vint Cerf, he came to London. I had an argument and a kind of a rap battle between the British museums, Egyptologists and Sumerian. So experts were arguing where writing first appeared. And it looks like writing code, maybe first up, an upper Egypt and tiny little tags on cloth to say what they were. Basically what you’d find in a supermarket today. It seemed to be the earliest right thing. So when I look at this museum, I look at the history of text and I think that, you know, we’re not going to create some little sculpture for them.

Frode Hegland: Not at all. This has to be a web based thing that can inspire the future. So if they do go with us, their marketing, their presentation should be that they support an open web. They don’t want to have a lockdown metaverse thing. They have to be aligned with our values. This was a very good point, Fabian, you brought up. That is absolutely core to this. I know you were talking about what Rafael was talking about, but as a reflection of our greater work as well. Alan, are you with us? So earlier I asked you the question. You seem to have gone away to make coffee or Something.

Frode Hegland: About I think it was. You asked somebody else the question. If we do this Egyptian stuff, what do we bring that a normal games or VR company wouldn’t bring to the table? Do we all agree that we can spend until Friday thinking about that, thinking about an aspect that we think we should work on?

Alan Laidlaw: I’ll read the email that you sent about it. I will I Will just be transparent that it’s It would take quite a bit to change my mind that I think this is a Distraction. Even if it lines up as the room As you described. The advantage of the things that we’re doing or that The Developers have been doing Is that We have complete control over the kind Of data The kind of interaction, what it does best that’s completely malleable. What you do here is unintentionally or very likely there are cases where it doesn’t happen. But very likely you you wind up realizing Months later that you’ve actually made Somebody else the boss of you. Right. And now you’re no longer doing the thing that you wanted to do and explore because that doesn’t line up. Right? So I’ll still I’ll read it. But that’s kind of my concerns.

Frode Hegland: I think with your experience, it’s a very valid and very real concern. And I think that if we give ourselves this week to dream and forget everything you just said just for one week. Yeah, but seriously, you know, to try to dream without reality and constraints is really hard. But if we can manage it this week, come together on Friday, see if we have some good things, put it up against the wall. But yes, you know, I can see that this certainly could become we’re just another design studio building, building, building them a shiny gizmo. And Christopher’s earlier comments can be absolutely apt as well. Yes, I can see that. So if we decide that this is for us, it would have to be very clear in what way we would do it and how it would work, what they would own, what would be open and so on. So yeah. Fabian. 

Fabien Benetou: Yeah, I don’t want to be part of that. Well, I’m fine being part of a studio, but if the studio is, let’s say, about augmented text or the future of using VR or tools to think and to manipulate and information and text better. But that’s not I don’t think there were a lot of studios doing that. But again, it goes back to what’s the core of both this group and then this potential exercise. Very naively, it reminded me of an experience I had as a kid. I had like stamps for euro glyphs, and I could write hieroglyphs with just stamping on a piece of paper. And that was a pretty good memory. And that’s also prompted. What’s prompted back by our initial discussion was this text or euro glyphs organized together in a cartouche, a kind of text, is it not? And I thought, I’m afraid that might be too much studio based, but carving through the stone, those hieroglyphs, or being able to pull your glyph out of a wall to get the meaning out of it. There are quite a few things there, but then again, is it too specific? Do we want to become is it an actual pedagogical tool or are we going to teach people how that could be? How you say researcher that we’re trying to uncover mystery and maybe learn about the society? Is it just a prompt? I’m not sure.

Frode Hegland: Really cool. So the way that I’m looking at it is I mean, first of all. We are at a very strange point in history. You know, we have a war in Europe. You know, people staying with me from the war in Europe. And getting the stories every day. And the weather is really nice here in London today, but that’s because of bloody climate change. It’s really scary what’s happening in the polls right now. So, yeah. Yeah. So we let’s be honest, we’re trying to save the world, right? At least we’re trying to make an effort. There’s no question about that. And also, I mean, from my personal perspective, there are a few things in my life that are stressing me beyond belief. So I’m a little if I’m a little more snobby, I apologize. But the thing is, this Egyptian thing, what it has given me and I hope it gives you the same, is the opportunity to dream really far. Because what you just said there, Fabian may be stupid. It may be genius. Right now we don’t know. You know, does it address what Chris talked about? Does it actually help people understand? Maybe it turns out, yes. I mean, like this book here that we keep holding up, maybe the act of actually doing those rubbings helps. Maybe not. And I don’t think we’re at the stage now where we should decide. I think we should just think of crazy stuff. Like, I was pretty pleased when I had the thought of, you walk into the timeline mural and you end up in that place. I thought that was pretty neat. Right. To me, that’s like a wow, I wouldn’t have thought of it earlier kind of thing. Right? Is it going to be useful? Maybe. Maybe the interaction is wrong, maybe it’s not feasible, I don’t know, etc., etc.. The way we throw things back around in the room, the way we have lines, it may get messy so quickly that it’s just stupid. I don’t know. But the fact that it is for an Egyptian collection and forget the museum because Alan is right, forget the people sitting there, forget all that stuff. But just the fact that we Have A space and a time, that is our initial focus. You know, I know that this group will have really, really interesting insights. I mean, look at Peter. He said we have a command line interface in VR. A lot of what Peter says. And I said, Well, love, Peter, it sounds ridiculous to begin with. It takes me roughly 3 to 6 months. And then I understand what you’re saying, right? So that is a real honest compliment. And look at Adam putting on Twitter, weird little folding of the map that it looks like a string falling down for a timeline. You know, there’s so much unique thinking here. And none of us are thinking metaverse. And how can we meet our friends better? None of us are thinking about how we can reload our virtual rifle better. So that’s why I hope we can really spend some time on fantasizing. About. I haven’t even. I mean, I haven’t even thought about hieroglyphics, hieratic and hieroglyphic writing in itself. The reasons behind them, the history of the usage, absolutely phenomenal degrees of that. All I hope is that when you leave this room as a as a human, as in the future, you can take something with you that is both frozen flat nonsense, PDF or whatever. And you go into another room and it’s just as alive. Because Chris’s point about We don’t want some whiz bang demo. I completely understand that. But he is sitting in a room that has pictures on the wall and these pictures have meaning, you know, the way you lay out the room has meaning. What is being I mean, Chris, either you come up to London this week or I’m coming down Southampton. I’m going to strap a headset to you. Raphael I sent you an email regarding this. Peter I’ve sent you an email earlier. We need to have the same experience as Bob. Have you bought your Oculus headset yet?

Bob Horn: So I’ve got many other things to do right now.

Frode Hegland: Why don’t you just check with your friends if you can, please borrow one. Because if you spend half an hour inside, I think that’s actually enough.

Fabien Benetou: Well, yes. I’m sorry just to interrupt. I’ve done that a couple of times, which is I got a courier, send my headset to a friend on the other side of town. Got it back the next day. You don’t you don’t need it for more than, let’s say, even half an hour or an hour, just enough to get a sense of it. And a courier does it pretty quick. Convenient.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Adam, you got it in the cutest way. You got it. When I’d go when you saw the Edgar video, didn’t you? By the way, I just have to read something really brief from Edgar’s teacher today, because here it’s length. So Edgar had to give up things, and Emily has been communicating back and forth with her. So the teacher says Edgar is the perfect example of a dumb head boy. Don had this the name of the school. I’m so proud of him. He has a wheel of steel and a big, kind heart of nominated him for the J.P. Award this term. This is for each boy in the class who exhibits our Jesuit pupil profile characteristic. He has so many of these characteristics at such a young age unfurled must be bursting with pride, just to tell You. Sorry.

Rafael Nepó: Nice.

Frode Hegland: It was. So it’s relevant. So anyway. Okay. So have we agreed that the Egyptian thing could be a colossal waste of time? Or it could be? Well, what is it? That guy, the old guy who said, Give me a place to stand on a lever long enough and I can move the world. It can be one of those, right?

Rafael Nepó: What I think is that. I think since I. Joined Twitter text discussions and and the conversations, we always have a lot of ideas, but it’s usually hard to make them to turn them concrete. And if a project like.This. Happens, then it’s a way for us to kind of stop dreaming a little bit and create something. Because I think we already have a lot of ideas and a lot of dreams and possibilities.But a project Brings us down. To earth. And to understand the real context that this is going to be inserted and trying to create something new for that specific context. So when I, when I, if I see the email and thinking about the interactions in museums, there is a lot of possibilities. I don’t think if we, if we put it in a spectrum of like this is basic text and this is extreme virtual reality, we’re not going to be extremely virtual reality. I think we have to find a place in the spectrum that will be useful and it will last quite a while because if we develop something that is going to go away in a year, then it’s what a waste of effort and. And everything. So I would prefer more concrete, less extreme projects that we put something in the world and the last for a longer time rather than try to explore some farfetched idea that might be incredible. I think small increments work better than big leaps.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, but then there’s the question. Was it you, Adam? Was the question, what is free and VR and what is expensive? Yeah. Because. Because that’s the funny thing that things that may seem expensive and difficult suddenly become nothing and vice versa. Little things become hard to do.

Bob Horn: Well, it’s one of the things that one asks here about a concrete. Writing a project with a plan, with a proposal, with a budget, all that sort of thing is what alternative we have. The alternative we have is going on having discussions like we’ve been having today and the last ten years.

Frode Hegland: I think I think the discussions have changed since January.

Bob Horn: Well, wait a minute, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Yeah, they of course, they’ve changed. You know, don’t don’t don’t make a make a stereotype out of my out of my comment.

Frode Hegland: No, no, no. Bob, look, you’re a very valued friend. You’re a very valued friend and a very valued member of the community. Absolutely. But what I mean is there have been quite a few tests and things. So like Adam with your mural in and this goes into our journal. So I think that when we did the future of text symposium before that it was completely open. Anybody say anything next? Now that we’re doing the journal, I think there’s a more building. And yes.

Peter Wasilko: But no Bob this time important. I agree with you. A specific project is absolutely the way to go. There’s no question about that. But I do think that the because VR is an entirely new medium, it’s really nice to see the effort that guys have put into doing stuff that we now have in the Journal. So that is very different from how we did it when it was text in any form, I think.

Bob Horn: Well, the question is deciding what a group or this group is going to do. Is that a decision that is going to be made? Because then you ask what the alternatives are to the to such a decision. The decision to start a project but of a huge budget. That’s the first that’s the first big question. And then, well, it could be the Egypt one or it could be something else. And sometimes if the Egypt one is already got some momentum and maybe some funders and and some and certainly has a great partner in the Egyptian Museum, then then you have some advantages for, for thinking about that alternative. But once you’ve already made the decision that we’re going to start a project.

Frode Hegland: Yes, yes. But Bob, that is why we’re spending this week giving everyone a little bit of breathing space so we can see on Friday if we feel it’s just demo nonsense or we can do something. So that’s what we’re doing. There has to be a little bit of this level of consensus building. I think by the way, I saw the hollow thing here. It reminds me I had a discussion with Ismail. He asked me about the HoloLens versus the Oculus. And of course the Oculus is three or $400. The HoloLens, the basic one is three and a half thousand dollars. Of course, the main difference is the Oculus is normally all VR, the other one is AR. But because I had issues with HoloLens, I didn’t know much about it, but I saw a video on YouTube. They’ve solved a lot of interesting interaction issues, you know, how to deal with buttons and stuff. So that was see later. Ellen So that was actually really, really surprising. So if you guys want to have a look at that, especially you haven’t been in the space for a while. Because the issues are not necessarily what we think they are. That’s all. Anyway, HoloLens worth having a look at. Yeah. Fabian.

Fabien Benetou: Worth having a quick look at. So I work a bit with the HoloLens two. It’s to be honest, one of the reasons I work with VR is more to be pragmatic. If if I could have all the time like very thin glasses, that would allow me to do VR or on the spot being able to choose, I would probably do that. But right now my experience, at least for the last couple of years and including with very expensive hardware, is the Oculus is the sweet spot. And VR is a. It’s usable today. Honestly, AR for now is a bit gimmicky. I don’t want to be too critical about it, but I mostly do VR to prepare for AR in the long term so that I can go in the park and have, let’s say, a conversation with someone while drawing in the air. I don’t know what we’re having when I go pick a book at the library and then I have whatever made that data on top. I still want this, but I think this is maybe still ten years ahead. So my perspective is I do VR today because it’s reliable and cheap enough and the skill set, the overlap is pretty close to AR. So if we prepare, prepare some data, set some experiences, all this for VR, it probably will work for air with of course some adjustment, but it will be the the same basis. Let’s say there is overlap, but I personally don’t invest too much time in there because I find it’s too finicky to imprecise, too unreliable, too uncomfortable and and still very expensive for the time being. So I still recommend, of course, like anything, if you can experience it today, please do. I mean, truly, it is worth it.

Fabien Benetou: And at least to evaluate, let’s say, the marketing gap because the video that honestly, I use it pretty much every time to as a as a provocation when when I started discussion with startups or others. Part of my job is to measure bullshit. And when I see so many videos like this, I get excited and then I try the thing. I’m like, Yeah, we’re not there yet. So I video is something. But if whatever you have the chance to a friend, museum or lab or whatever to try these headsets do but but be prepared a reality is a bit harsher than than those videos it’s still worth exploring 100% but yeah. Just, just want to warn that it’s tricky and it’s not uncomfortable. It’s not comfortable. So interesting. I also share a video. I forgot that there was a researcher, I think from Edinburgh who was doing augmented book cover. So like you have the bookshelf and then you can see metadata while looking at the of the book. So that was pretty good. But again, to go from there to a pleasant interaction with a whole hands to or phone or whatnot is still a couple of years ahead. We have time to be ready for this, I would say.

Rafael Nepó: It was interesting. I didn’t think that when you started talking about how you’re doing VR to prepare for AR. I never thought about it that way. But it does make sense because I think AR is is is the long term and VR is more specific applications. So when Frode says that it’s a completely new medium, I kindly disagree because we’ve been trying VR in different levels for for 30 years as the technology has been evolving little by little. From little by little.

Frode Hegland: Well, I don’t agree with you because first of all, I was doing QuickTime videos when 320 by 240 and 15 frames a second was amazing, right? That is not the same as going to the cinema. The fact that it’s frames that change is of course we’re talking to some degree about degrees. But you know, what’s the difference between showing one picture and then another one? Once you do it fast enough, you have a movie, right? That’s a McLuhan thing. So so the quality of something changes. So the quantity of something changes the quality, right? I will find a way to send you a damn headset because one of the surprising things about the way it is now that visually it’s still only okay. You can say the little dots is a little blurry, all that stuff, but it’s so completely rock solid and the way you move your head, every single detail, you really have a sense of presence that was not there in the early.

Rafael Nepó: I want to say, Frode , is that it will continue to get better. And this is not the final version. No, no, no. Ah, we can use it on our phones with phones from like.

Frode Hegland: Rafael. Can I finish, please? Let me just finish. Right. It is. It’s really annoying to try to have to sell a whole new thing. I mean, I remember when since you brought up mobile phones, when mobile phones first came up, a lot of people say, why would you want such an expensive yuppie toy? If it’s important, they’ll call back. Right. That was also a bit of a fight. Now it’s normal to to turn this on and switch on some kind of an app for AR VR and hardly anyone does it. It’s just not very practical. But what I’m saying, it’s a new medium. I’m saying that devices that can do AR VR in a few years can do both. It’s almost the same technology, right? And with the Oculus, you can really feel it because you have the option to have pass through video at any time. So of course, in many cases you don’t want to be enclosed, encased in a different environment. I don’t think anyone argues that at all. You know, if it can put something on the wall behind you and all these things, of course that’s going to be amazing. There will also be times when you want to be utterly transported, where you want to use everything around you. And the reason I say it’s a new medium is because just as one little example, and this is really quite a bit of it for me, a bit of a mind f if you want to use the term the mural for bulb and VR.

Frode Hegland: If it’s static and I walk to it by moving a joystick type thing, I get a bit queasy. My body doesn’t like it, but if I pinch it towards me, which is exactly the same thing, I don’t feel anything that’s weird. So unless you actually can afford the money to have a room that is only for VR, a lot of VR will be sit down and stand up. And also, you know, to an extent. So there are all these tiny little wrinkles. That’s why I mean, it’s a new medium. And also we haven’t worked in it enough to make it messy. Like, remember, the first Macintosh was immaculate, but you can only have about five files on it. So once we really start living and making a mess and doing these things, like some of the stuff that Adam has been putting in the Twitter about folding a map in this specific way, you can’t do that with a wall size map, even if it’s like a Japanese kind of a folding thing. You can’t actually do it. That’s what I mean. It is a new medium. The Jaron Lanier.A Couple of years ago going into a room and having a cable and all that, it is very, very different. We have to learn this together. And I think this group can do that So. Rafael, I’m I don’t know what my tone of voice is, but I can tell you my feeling my feeling is frustration because I respect you. And what you’re saying is exactly what I said until I put the headset on. It’s just that if.

Rafael Nepó: All I’m saying that we’ve been putting we’ve been putting goggles and experience in that environment for quite a while already. This is just another new generation of it. And I, like I mentioned, I prefer to work in the foundation of texts rather than the possibilities of text. I think that the foundation of text still has a lot to improve. And in case of this specific project, I would totally work on the content, the information architecture to then hand off to be explored in VR. But I think it’s separate. Separate environments.

Frode Hegland: Yes, separate environments that have to work together. That is absolutely one of the key things that have to happen. That’s something that is just so absolutely important.

Bob Horn: You know, and they will and we will different of us will be working on different aspects of it. I’m not going to be working on it, but I’m going to be working with Raphael on the on the architect, what he calls the architecture, which I call the structure of knowledge. But but I think we the same thing, you know, and and and maybe others will be will join us at different times. And we’ll we’ll feed in to what some of the people are more interested in, in actually building a timeline that has doorways or windows or or slide ins. I don’t know. You know, there are different metaphors that that that I’m thinking about or or even a timeline that has has catchers that will that will catch. You’re throwing the pyramid at it. You know, there are going to be people working on that. I’m not going to be working on that particularly. I like the I love the concept, but I’m going to be working on the nature of knowledge. And I think that’s.

Rafael Nepó: And I think that’s just a closing point is so when when I see projects like that, let’s think of of the people who are part of the community as different people with different interests that can combine to make something even better. So if there’s developers that want to develop the VR part, that’s amazing. And then if there’s people like me and Bob that are going to be a little bit more backstage structuring the information, that’s also incredible. So instead. Of. Getting everybody on the same boat for one interest, let’s keep people in different boats and then, you know, form an armada of sorts. Oh.

Frode Hegland: Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s really, really important. We have very different mindset. I see Fabian has got his hand up, but just really briefly for me, text now is multi dimensional. Sometimes we’re going to view it in flatland screens, which are really, really important. They’re going to remain important, but that is a subset of the full rich environment. Fabian.

Fabien Benetou: I’m sorry, but I’m going to insist. Not. Not for your purse. Honestly, I don’t care about VR and not for the final user. Let’s say somebody who would experience. But because I am convinced and it’s just a conviction, I don’t have the proof or data behind it, but that that video itself is a tool that could help to get that structure out. That’s my motivation for this, honestly. That’s why I’m here to this chat today, and that’s what I work in. Vr is not as a tool to present, it can be as a tool to present. It’s been proven there in games and whatnot. That’s no question there, but rather has the tool to find the structure in a complex set of information. To me, that’s the most interesting. So even if actually, let’s say the result would not be in VR, would be, let’s say a flat PDF, but VR where used by you or somebody who works with you in order to help find the structure behind the information. To me, that’s the most valuable.

Frode Hegland: Completely, utterly Agree.

Frode Hegland: Adam, I’d like to hear your thoughts, if you don’t mind.

Adam Wern: On all of the topics so far?

Frode Hegland: Yes, you have one hour and 15 minutes worth of topics to cover.

Adam Wern: So many quick comments on the subject matter. We have a kind of Egypt versus murals, Bob Horne murals versus other datasets we talked about before. Perhaps even Jamie Joyce. She they have made fantastic argument maps that could also be interesting. These are kind of more more thing. Highly refined objects that are also a bit more intellectual objects that we could work with as well. So it depends on maybe the Egypt exhibition, depending on on Ismail and the museum people, maybe they want it as an introductory guide to. To the museum in some way. And we may not even we may not be able to do the more intellectual things or higher order thinking in there. Maybe we could sneak it in, but it could be a conflict of interest there. Or a conflict of. Yeah. So. So I’m interested. I really think I agree with Bob. And further, that we should pick a subject matter and and and stick to it. But we, we have more subject matters available to us. And I think Jamie sounded ecstatic about hearing that, that we may be able to do something in VR with all the argument or argument mapping. And they are have extensive resources as well with video backing material. And so we could do rich things there. So that’s an alternative. Yeah. I read your commentary, Frodo, that we could put murals in Egypt as well or in that exhibition. But if the question is rather, what is the starting starting point of the main thing? Because one of the major risks we’re doing a very immersive thing is that just like visualization and interaction, there are so many. Rich things that lead to nothing. That the experience itself is so rich. I’ve been fiddling around with many of my prototypes, just fiddling around with them. It’s so rich and so interesting to do it, but I don’t really learn anything. So, so, so. Yeah. And I think immersive environments are even more dangerous in that sense. There are so many very rich things out there. It leads to nothing. So we need to be twice as much more focused on the jobs to be done. And what you actually get out of it. And I think Chris has been talking about this, about what are we actually doing there and learning there. And so we we must be. If we work with scientific papers, it’s a bit easier. But if we work with rich environments and. Immersive environments, we have to be even more focused on what on the job to be done and jobs to be done. So over that was just a few points here. Yeah.

Frode Hegland: Thank you, Adam.

Bob Horn: Can I react? Can I react to that brief?

Frode Hegland: We’re running out of time, and there’s a hand up, but. Yeah, briefly.

Bob Horn: I agree that that argumentation mapping is important. I did. I did the most the largest and strongest and biggest argumentation map 20 years ago 800 moves in the argument and happy to talk with you about it because I followed it ever since and and I agreed that. Another subject matter such as sustainability or climate change, would be better than Egyptology. In one sense, in that it would also be addressing the current existential risks to humanity. So if we if we had a funder or a partner in that area and that we could plow ahead on it, I’d be with I’d be with you on a different subject matter than Egypt. But we have Egypt presented as a possibility. Okay. Over to you. Wrote it.

Fabien Benetou: To come. Two quick remarks and I don’t know if all content is the same. I don’t know if, let’s say for our goal for exploring augmented text, if, if, I don’t know, a scientific paper or bibliography or geometry or or Egypt or climate change the same if it is, then indeed, if there is a content that is more pressing to us or dearest to us, like climate change, then, then yes, that would be maybe more important, more exciting or more exhilarating or motivate us more. And also and it’s something that’s been mentioned a few time with a smile is also the partner. There has to be somebody who gets it, somebody who doesn’t believe we are a 3D game studio or somebody who doesn’t believe or, I don’t know, doing geometry if that’s not what we’re doing. So I think if all content is the same, then for who we do it and somebody who really gets our goal is more important. And then the last point is, if it’s not, then it’s extremely interesting because it means some content is more apt or will better be analyzed, presented fine structure. This we’re not and this is completely let’s say the Mexican side is is this medium really generalist or not? Is it more is it better adapted to some kind of content? I, I would I imagine it’s generalist, but it might not be it maybe it’s for specific kind of content. I don’t know.

Frode Hegland: Right. Okay. So I see I see this funny point about dinosaurs. I mean, I know not everybody is on the same level of scared of climate change as some other ones. Some of us are. I’m shit scared of that, you know, but I’m also sitting at a in Europe with an active war happening. You know, poverty. There are some real issues. And with all due respect, I don’t think any one of us can solve these issues, not that anyone else is saying it. And I also don’t think that I and I’m not speaking for anyone else, I don’t have the expertise to provide a climate experience model interaction system to build. There’s been a lot of fantastic work done in that space, but I don’t think I could contribute to that. What I think is the most important thing and what I honestly think this group has the potential to do. To read what I just wrote in the chat, I think the most important mission is to raise the expectation of what it can be to work in VR. Ah, because whether it’s large degrees or small degrees, to look at Raphael’s point. I come from an art background. I’m an artist. I cannot program to save my life. I’m almost innumerate. There’s a lot of things I cannot do. We all here in this group have very different skill sets and minds, which is great. None of us are plain, normal people. But when I look back at what happened with the first Macintosh, I think I mentioned this to some of you. You get word processing in a spreadsheet and that’s about it.

Frode Hegland: We haven’t seen hardly anything happen in the last 40 years of computing. You all know some of them like the web is great and so on. The fact the very fact that we now have this new AR VR thing, which is going to change, I really, honestly, truly think that instead of just metaverse about chatting with your friends and going to concerts and all of that stuff, which commercial interest will do? I really think we have to raise the bar for you. Go into a virtual office and Oh my fucking God, I can do this. I can get that insight, I can connect these things, I can manipulate it in this way. That in itself. Is it? It could be about Lego blocks. I don’t give a flying monkey about the subject matter. I really don’t. So I think that if we in one sense, we’re given a gift from this Egypt thing, if it happens. But yes, the concerns that they may want to boss us around and make it into Disney. Equally strong concern. Of course it is. But we could, of course, choose to do this Egyptian thing without them. Or pick medieval history or know the subject matter for me has absolutely no interest. Just being able to show people, sorry for repeating myself, I just really need to hammer this point home.

Frode Hegland: For someone to put on the glasses, go into the space, and to be able to do things that in the physical world we cannot do. And that actually addresses this thing of is it just a flashy demo? That’s it. It’s so important because I think that once Apple and others produce consumer friendly headsets that are widely used, have maybe one or two years than human imagination, sorry to swear again will be fucked. We want to think of it as new anymore. And that’s what scares the living daylights out of me. Our human imagination is powerful but is also very, very limited.

Peter Wasilko: In that excellent note, I need to put on my chauffeur hat and head out with Mom on Friday.

Frode Hegland: Have a good day, Peter.

Peter Wasilko: Bill I’ve got to leave to.

Frode Hegland: I’m going to go greet my son, whom I’m so proud of in a minute. By the way, I watched Hamilton with our Ukrainian family this week. The King’s Song. Is Putin. It was really uncomfortable watching, considering one of our friends. Her husband is there. He was the one I thought was there blogging. But of course, he wasn’t blogging. He was making roadblocks. There was the language issue. So to talk about, you know. If you haven’t heard the King song in Hamilton.

Fabien Benetou: And I also learned the correct road for you to watch everything again.

Frode Hegland: I want to watch it because of its emotional beauty. But to see it with these people who are actively in that situation was really insensitive of me and I didn’t actually notice that until halfway through and but they were okay with it. So yeah, the world is tricky. We’ve got to here’s the thing. This is the final sentence for me. The world is tricky. We need to get a better handle on it. See you Friday, everyone, I hope.

Fabien Benetou: As long as we deal with it. Thank you.

Peter Wasilko: Thank you all. Thank you very much for everything today.

Chris Gutteridge: Thank you.

Frode Hegland: Very much. Bye.

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