Tr : 4 April 2022

Chat: https://futuretextlab.info/2022/04/04/chat-4-april-2022/

Peter Wasilko: Starting to go.

Frode Hegland: Well, that was a bit embarrassing. I was actually lost in VR. So maybe appropriately embarrassing, but embarrassing nevertheless.

Adam Wern: How do you mean? Lost in VR, did you?

Frode Hegland: Well, I have this. I’ll show you. I went to join Fabian’s room again, but that was a couple of hours too late.

Adam Wern: And then you took the wrong corridor and couldn’t find the power button and.

Frode Hegland: Well, I have this 360 camera. The Insta360. So this is an early one. So it doesn’t.

Peter Wasilko: Do.

Frode Hegland: Oh yeah. Oh, that’s a theta, right. So it doesn’t fall audio round, it’s just normal. So I just look to see if the newer ones do special audio because one of the things about the VR workroom Facebook thing is that sound thing you can hear where people are. So I just thought about that anyway. Sorry. I apologize.

Peter Wasilko: How are Emily and I you’re doing have they recovered from COVID yet or what’s happening there? We’ve been.

Frode Hegland: Recovered. Emily had one horrible day. Edgar had one day where he was a bit tired, and that’s it. So that’s been a blessing. Nothing other than Emily’s horrible.

Peter Wasilko: One day. Thank you for all. Thank heavens I’ve been worried about them. And as you’re cold, going to worry about you too.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, my cold is the least of my worries, but thank you very much for that. So there is a core group here. I got a message from Allen. He cannot make it for a while because of things, work things. And I had a realization today that it’s kind of important to share. It’s obvious, but in a way, we all have to focus on what’s important in our lives, obviously. And for me, what’s important is documents, visual matter.

Peter Wasilko: And author.

Frode Hegland: Outside of this. Hello, David.

Peter Wasilko: Hi. Hi.

Frode Hegland: A bit of housekeeping and. And B are thinking. So that’s why guys, I was thinking and since I think I only posted on Twitter the thoughts that we should focus on documents, but not to the exclusion of other things. I think a powerful thing would be for our pitch, which is kind of our demo to have.

Peter Wasilko: On.

Frode Hegland: Maybe the front page. It says, Welcome to reading this PDF if you want to see it in VR. Go to this address. Simple URL, open it an oculus or whatever. And that document is then presented. And to answer the why question Adam so intelligently kept asking, it’s to support arguments like we have in academia. Within academia, it takes months. It could be an argument from one document to another that was 2 minutes apart. It could be just a sentence, because then we have these free and open modules that can be visualized hugely in VR but also remain outside the world. So that’s that’s kind of what this weekend has resulted in. And also. Sorry. Before you. Since you’re not talking yet, the mural work, I think is so incredible. It’s funny that we call it mural because it can be used for so many other aspects of data. So I think that will be absolutely crucial. It could be. Let’s say you take all the pictures of a document and automatically have it on a mural or many other things. It’s just wonderful to see that development. Yeah. Peter.

Peter Wasilko: Well, I had a bit of an epiphany over the weekend. I got to the point where, as you know, I’ve been working in the input programming language for doing front end tools and basically building a whole visual framework for websites and like and it got to the point where the code became too voluminous for me to even manage what I was doing using Visual Studio. And I realized that I had to go back to the literal programming methodology again, which I had successfully used a number of times, and I slipped away from it when Visual Studio came out, because it has all of those nice language. Server affordances of being able to pop up code completions and things which my other tools don’t have. And that was such an important thing for me. I started going back into Visual Studio and doing all my code there until it got to the point that the volume of code had so many files that I started looking at stuff that I wrote a couple of months ago, and I couldn’t remember why I did it the way that I did it. So then I dug out new web. Turns out there’s a slightly newer version of new web from late last fall, so I got that compiled beautifully. One step is just wonderful. Just a simple make command on the Mac and I had my new version of the utility, popped it into my search path and had it running. And then, of course, I realized that there aren’t any good tools for authoring new web code, and the new web started to grow.

Peter Wasilko: So, okay, now I have to pull out Tinderbox again. So pulling out my trusty tinder box, I came up with a nice little template that would let me interleave little bits of latex code. The tinderbox was helping me to auto generate make things faster with the new web literate programming directives. And at that point, I realized that I really needed an all the Fords that I had from about 2017. I had it rigged up way back then to have Tinderbox Automatically Sync Files. And it’s something that Tinderbox currently doesn’t do. But what I want to be able to do is to be editing a file in Tinderbox or edit that exact same file in Visual Studio code. Since Visual Studio code gives me the hooks for being able to get the code completions. So I want to be able to do with modify the code and Visual Studio, save it and then have Tinderbox automatically pick up those changes. And in order to do that, I found that I’d written a program in the crystal programming language back when Crystal was like 0.5, and now it’s at 1.3.2. So I’m digging out this old crystal code from 2017, trying to get it running with the current version of Crystal. And I’m currently up to the point where I’m looking at some X path code for poking into the Tinderbox XML file and it’s not working. And that’s where I am this morning, but that’s just sort of what my weekend experience was like.

Frode Hegland: That’s and I have no comment entirely far beyond my understanding of basically anything but cool. So now you have 30 seconds without hesitation or repetition to say how that relates to VR.

Peter Wasilko: It relates to trying to do literate programming and bring that into the VR space. I think we should be able to focus on the problem of programmers who can’t deal with the clutter of Visual Studio. And if you can expand that out into a larger space, I think that could be a sweet spot and a very useful forum if we could work in that direction. And of course, it would also help us to make better tools ourselves for use down the road. So I think literate programming is a way of bringing text also back into the VR and it’s worth a little bit of thought.

Frode Hegland: That makes sense. Or just have to send a message. Just 1/2. But on the more specific issue of.

Peter Wasilko: What.

Frode Hegland: We should do, what do you think of.

Peter Wasilko: The.

Frode Hegland: Documents and how we connect them in our approach, starting with the page document as the starting document?

Adam Wern: I have a bit bit of a problem to like. Imagine. Not of what it could be, but how how it would be pitchy for someone not so much into, I call them very reluctant people to and to. Of course, if you force a headset on them and let them experience something that could be could convince them, but I’m not really sure how it connects to the actual pitch document because I think having a Yeah. A tour of, of interesting VR experiences, this could be a bit more powerful than, than showing the documents just spread out in VR. And I don’t think we have time to do anything really interesting more than spreading things out and maybe a few very basic interactions if we do something custom ourselves. So I think it’s more convincing to try a different yes, try a few different different apps and rooms and experiences and feel the sense of. Yes. Stereoscopic at that kind of viewing and manipulation with hands. It’s an extra convincing thing, I think, and so on.

Frode Hegland: Well, I’m not thinking only that, but I think telling them, Hey, get a headset on and try these apps. It’s not really selling us and it’s not.

Peter Wasilko: Really.

Frode Hegland: Convincing. I’m thinking initially mailing an Oculus headset to Vint Cerf to be delivered on, let’s say the 29th and emailing him this document on the same day. So the first thing that’s so amazing is the mural. It really. Today I saw Phil Gooch who presented to us a week ago. We were on the Barbican sitting there in a coffee shop with a headset looking like idiots. I forgot to take in the controller so all had to be pension we had to do. It was horrible on boarding, but he immediately.

Peter Wasilko: Saw.

Frode Hegland: When he was there with the mural. And the mural is the simplest possible thing. It’s one flat image and that’s it. So even that so what I’m actually envisioning is as a document we do a few maybe open things like but the whole point is there is a mural in there, so we have an interaction. You come to a mural and we’ve told the person that you tap on it or whatever it is and boom, it’s on the wall. A few things like that I think will be hugely impressive. Fabian.

Mark Anderson: You know. So I have a friend who is a smaller than me. So he at some point I showed him some of the different demos and he he’s excellent with communication. And basically he asked me, what am I showing or showcasing or without doing dirty selling? And after a bit of discussion, he convinced me that I was trying to sell VR rather than my use case for VR, or rather than the tools I built to help that use case for VR. So I’m wondering if that’s a bit what we’re doing here that I don’t know, but I believe we should not sell VR to people. What we should do is propose that for sure the future of text, some future of text for some people will be in VR in R like this. I’m not about 99%. I’m 100% sure. It might just be us, though. It might be a very small group. It might be people who are into computational notebooks. It might be other people, might be just teachers. I have literally no idea. But then it’s a very different question in the sense that we’re not trying to say, Hey, buy your headsets or VR is cool for everything. It’s like in our specific use case, in some form of text and some of interaction with it is so much better than this. We are so much better than new iPhone or whatever it is you’re using. And I think it makes a completely different conversation rather than during the new Cool Head that is VR. And it means we can really focus more on this and not alienate people about VR is the future because I don’t know, but I don’t think we have to rely on the assumption of popularity. Maybe it’s going to stay a niche thing and then we can be okay with that. Of course, if it’s everybody using it and extremely affordable and helps everyone, it is better. But that might be wrong. And the worst part of this being wrong is it might hold us back while being irrelevant.

Frode Hegland: Right. Lots of.

Peter Wasilko: Points.

Frode Hegland: First of all, the thing that I want to sell, I hope you agree, the rest of you, that what we’re currently selling is the idea of work and VR can be powerful if integrated into a normal environment because it shouldn’t be a ghetto. It shouldn’t be just trying to get you in VR the whole time. That’s really important. And so part of that then becomes selling them on VR in and of itself, because once you see it like everyone here has gone through except for Jupiter, but don’t worry, we’ll change that. We all think we know what it is. You put the headset on, it’s like, Oh my God, it’s a completely different thing. The fact that the room is stable is just insane. So that’s the first thing we have to sell. Vr is interesting and number two, the in and out of the workflow. So if we do start with what looks like a normal PDF floating in front of them. You know, which is really boring, but with some simple interactions, you know, like what you guys have been working on with folding the mural and stuff and they realize that is room scale, even though they’re sitting down, then we’re beginning to sell them on ideas. One thing we might do, somebody in the group a while ago talked about having guides in VR.

Frode Hegland: Now imagine if we can find a way to record one of us saying, you know, when you click a button or whatever is a guided tour is the saying, thanks for trying this. You know, the hands are there to point out. I’m so glad you tried the thing. Have you tried this, by the way? Here are some of the issues. You can’t do this. You can’t do that. That’s what we need to work on. So I think we’re agreeing, Fabienne, that we’re not necessarily trying to sell it for everyone. But we are trying to show that for people who are serious about knowledge work, there are some aspects we should be in VR. There’s a weird level of silence now, so why don’t we. Why don’t I reverse the question almost and say, considering that we are going to be doing VR stuff? And we don’t want to do demos that are nonsense. We want to do something useful. What do you guys think we should do? For a month’s time to show someone there’s some potential. And now we have a lot more work to do. I’ll mute myself. So we’ll see how long it takes for comments.

Peter Wasilko: Well, first, one.

Mark Anderson: Way to be interested in VR without being interested in VR full fledged work is rely on somebody else. Like it could be interesting that you remain with someone else, remain in the headset to do some organization manipulation event showcasing well somebody just drag and drop document would just pick the output let’s say of the session. And I think that that makes it more inclusive and hopefully people will then be convinced and curious and do dive in. Because I’m also it’s funny that I’m I’m not arguing against your or your knowledge work in your work again. That’s why I’m here. So there is no question about it. But that some some others I spend so many years trying to convince VR that VR is real, is interesting, and not just for games that now I’m just how does that work? So that is also one way to make it in terms of the automated way to do an introduction that can then definitely be done. I was wondering, let’s say, about giving a tour of some of my rooms by little robot. The little wooden challenge I see with that is not technical, but rather that we don’t easily get feedback. Like if it doesn’t work personally, click on the wrong button somehow does bad interaction. It’s not great. One thing though that is definitely easy to do and good and cheap let’s say, is doing let’s say in in Inkscape or whatever. Two D graphic program, a little poster that is an introduction and say you can use the button here, that button there this does this. A typical session is 5 minutes. Whatever we want. You can save doing this. You can say doing it and just copy pasting it in the space or leaving it there next to the actual content like a little manual included. That should be the default, especially if people want to come back after and there is no interaction there. But honestly, a human touch where we can actually give tours, I think it’s much more demanding, but more powerful, helpful, because then we get on the spot criticism, feedback, new ideas. Rather the robot will probably not.

Frode Hegland: That’s a really good point and I am asking for a quarter million dollars a year, so we’re not asking for piddly tiny things. Barbara Brandel is joining us just. I Brandel. You missed all the fun bits. We’re going to be really boring now. Um, just a real quick summary. We are talking about being very, very specific. I’m trying to get some funding for the lab, and even if we don’t do a lot, it’s quite a lot of money. So the idea is to have a document, normal PDF with all the sales pitches and all of that stuff that it says on the cover. To view this and be our go to this URL, you go to that page initially, you just see the documents. Not very impressive at all, but in that document you have murals, images, whatever we can squeeze in.

Peter Wasilko: There.

Frode Hegland: With the workflow being arguments through documents, basically citation, workflow, right? So Fabian was pointing out some issues now about kind of semi guided tours for this. The very first person we need to convince that’s Vint Cerf. So I’m going to send him an Oculus. He’s going to put it on his head so we can be on a Skype or Zoom or whatever call with him. At the same time, I don’t know how we’re going to share the visual, but that’s one thing. And by the way, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, I posted on Twitter today I felt good first time in VR and the video that I captured is wide. They finally gone from box to wide. It’s so much easier to view. So what we could when we go further is to make a literal one minute video introduction. When you go in there like what you were talking about, Fabian, it’s like, here are some of the controls, a bit of an onboarding because yes, onboarding is absolutely one of the key issues. Mark And then David.

Mark Anderson: Sorry. Yeah, I really liked actually the point Fabio made about a sort of almost a mixed mode of working, not just in terms of the demo, but this idea that one area that’s easy to overlook is that you might be co working with someone who, who, who doesn’t need to be in VR but is working alongside you, who doesn’t need the affordances that that you need or vice versa. So that actually I find quite interesting because you don’t always, you don’t necessarily need to be in the environment all the time. And this, I think, might also help bridge some of the gaps that are seen sort of in your turn with Vint. So yeah, you know, it’s interesting, but are we there yet? I think and again, sorry, I think it was Fabian’s point that, you know, this probably isn’t everything that everyone needs right away. It’s definitely something that’s going to come. And it will a bit like I think back to the nineties and watching the sort of the Internet arrive and the presence of the web, it took a while and then it was quite fast. But you know, I do remember the middle of the nineties explaining to people that I was actually writing to people on a computer when I could have just put it on paper and put in the post box and they just didn’t get it.

Mark Anderson: And so there’s some there’s something to overcome there. I think the other useful thing and it was picked up so he said to me is, is also addressing the small and the large and the small, where we’re addressing some really useful things like just the issue of how you transition something. An object, a bit of information in and out of the space. And the larger is, is the experiment I’m just starting on is sort of decomposing Bob’s mural assessing experiment, because until I’ve actually pulled the data out, I don’t know if we really have something to play with. But what I thought might work there for, again, for the person who doesn’t sort of get what it’s about is, is to just understand the ability to decompose and recompose some information. Again, most again, most people aren’t used to the view specs. The idea that one document can really be many things. It’s obvious when, you know, I’m realizing it’s not at all obvious when you don’t. So I was thinking that something that’s quite visual might might get people past the hurdle of saying, Wow, okay, it’s just a document, it’s in VR, but what’s the point? Which is often the way with many people with the new technology. So that’s where I think those two might come together.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. Thanks, David.

Peter Wasilko: I’m thinking about the directive around a mural that allows access to additional information and is very similar to kind of the way we’ve been thinking about it on as a as an a layer on top of the web that’s attention triggered provides 360 degree context and also allows for navigation without search. And I think that this notion of basically it abstracts out the, the actual virtual realities from a layer on top of them that allows for anyone to attach information to a piece of content, which could be a piece of content on the web, but also could be an object in a virtual world or it could be a AR overlay as well. And yeah, so by abstracting that out from the actual experience, it creates the possibility of being able to evolve the information that’s associated with pieces of information in the experience. And so what I think is really interesting is basically this notion of being able to go to the mural and to go deeper on whatever you want. And, and I say attention triggered. So what I mean by that is that as you move your attention, which is the line of sight with a VR goggles or glasses as you move, that if there’s anything in this invisible layer that’s associated with what you’re focusing at the moment, then it tells you, okay, there’s something here, so something pops up. Maybe it’s a badge with the number on it. If they interact with that, they can see an overview of all the citations and all the contradicting information and any supporting information, maybe messages. I mean, message sequences or conversations or polls or anything that’s associated with that little thing that they’re looking at is kind of, I think, a really interesting way of, of of thinking about it. So anyway, it’s very consistent with what you all are talking about.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. I mean, it is. At some point, we have to decide on something. And for context, because not all of you have been part of everything. You know, on the 27th, I’m having my PhD exam, so I’ll know that day whether I can put those letters after my name. So I’ve decided to wait until doing any pictures, because if I say that I developed this during my PhD, then it shows I have a knowledge of academia. Hopefully I will actually pass it. So that’s that’s why I’ve given us that. Give me give on us. Anyway, I feel we have a month to do something. And you know, Adam’s questions that I saw on chat about convincing himself and stuff. Yes, I agree with that. You know, this weekend is intellectually been really awful for me because it’s right. Very often if you look at something in VR, you realize that will solve problems in 2D as well. What actually is better in VR? I think most of us here just have a notion that something will be. I mean, when mobile phones came out, there was this thing of if it’s important, they’ll call back. You know, the whole idea of a mobile phone took quite a while to settle, why it’s really useful. And now we don’t even use a mobile phone for phone calls very much. You know, we use it for text, which is relevant to us, right? So what I’m trying to talk about today is how can we pitch for someone to give us money so that we can pay someone to do the boring coding work and we do the fun coding work and help us really spread the message that VR work can be incredibly powerful. We don’t know much about it yet, but there are some indications. Yeah. If.

Mark Anderson: Couple of points. Whether the negative one or the tricky one is. So I’ve given. Dozens, if not hundreds of demos like the first time people never tried the and then I put the headset on and I honestly I not it was good sometimes I was paid for it, sometimes just for fun. And it’s still something marvelous. Like, I invite friends to come here and try Dior for the first time. So that’s great. That all that being said, it is tricky. It is tricky, especially for people who never tried. And I don’t know, let’s say if Winthrop is the person to convince for the following steps, if he has ever tried. If not, then it means he is skeptical. And if he’s skeptical is going to have a doubtful approach to it and maybe not follow properly the tutorial, maybe not install or make an account or be a bit reticent about it. So that just flagging this here, a little bit of warning that even if the older work is done, that is a risk that the person who is not so sure and thus never tried have to follow the step. So I don’t know how practical it is, but if there is somebody who is in person can help a newcomer for the onboarding, that’s for my experience, the preferred option. And even that is not trivial because for example, sometimes the headset doesn’t recognize the room. You just need to set up.

Mark Anderson: You put the headset on the person’s head and then you have to remove it because somehow it’s confused. Too much light, too much movement. I don’t even know why. So just a little flag there that I, I don’t know if I ever actually tried this, meaning shitting a headset and telling the person follow those steps and sadly Facebook or fucked it up quite a bit. I would argue that the onboarding was better three years ago than today, that we had less hoops to go through. And now with the mandatory account, with some tracking, lost onboarding loss is not so evident. So one option is also to get a headset. Prepare it, meaning register it, make an account having the browser up to date and make sure the default. One of the bookmarked page is the one of the demo, for example. It sounds a bit like overkill, but like I also gave Demo VR to the IPS that had calendars of 50 minute slots and they did not have the patience. And if it’s not my super well oiled thing, then it’s. And then it’s like when you spot a typo or mistake at the beginning of a document, then you focus on this rather than on the content. So it’s silly. I know those are like not like deep intellectual questions, but in the end, in practice, those are blocking for adoption or for the curiosity.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don’t I don’t mind that. I mean, one of the the first issue is we need to convince a few people like Ben Ismail is also going to get an Oculus, right? So for the very first people who will help us spread the word further, we can be there, no question via voice call or whatever. I think that is very important because sitting there today at the Barbican Centre where the Phil for the first time ever and VR, there was this issue in that issue and a signing issue and all of these issues, it was it was kind of ridiculous. So no question, those are real stumbling blocks. But the thing is, we go around in all kinds of tangents of what’s cool and VR Brandel did an amazing job of getting the glossary terms and the map into VR, which is phenomenal. And then we have a lot of work being spent on what we currently call the mural. It’s obviously much more than a mural. You know, these things are really, really powerful. So all I’m saying is that if our pitch document is a normal document, you open it up. Well, here’s the glossary. Wow. Here’s a mural explaining maybe just the highlights of the timeline of the history of texts, something relevant, but so people can feel, okay, we give these people a ton of money. They can go to the next level because we will also say, by the way.

Peter Wasilko: I.

Frode Hegland: Should be able to do this. That and the other is not possible yet. Yeah. Mark.

Mark Anderson: Yeah. I’m just. Just thinking. Listening, listening. You speak that through. I’m just wondering what. What, what, what Vint or Ismail or someone might find compelling in terms of. So it’s not so much what it can do, but what’s something that they might want to do that’s hard to do. So what are the sort of battery of things that are interesting, things that we’ve looked at in the round? So it might be technique, it might be content. I don’t really know them well enough, but I sense part of the hook is thinking, Gosh, I didn’t even know this was possible. I think for some people the environment will be fine. I mean, they will they will look at it. They won’t be surprised by it. They may not be thrilled by it. You know, they’ll accept it for what it is. So if you if there isn’t that angle of excitement, the question is, okay, so why am I doing this? And I think therefore the question is, what can we give them? What can we or at least hint to them that they might find difficult to do without the extra affordances of VR?

Frode Hegland: Yeah, absolutely. That is what we have to find. But at some point we’ve got to do a thing right, because right now Fabian and Brandel are doing amazing things and Adam as well. But we don’t always get the link, so I can’t put them on the website, so we can’t all experiment with them. Right, which is absolutely fine. We all have to be honest to what we need to focus on in our lives. But if we want to do a coherent pitch, that document is it’s because in a document, let’s say that Adam wants to show off the round room with text. We put it in the document when some kind of a link. And then of course, the question becomes, what is a link in VR? How do you put things together? These become real, tangible issues and hopefully that will help us solve the how can we help you work in VR? Because I agree. Mark and Adam said earlier, you know what is actually helpful for people in VR? I don’t think we can find that by talking or writing. I think we can only find it by experimenting.

Peter Wasilko: But yeah.

Mark Anderson: Yeah. To to go back also on Adam’s point about convincing himself. So I invested the last five, six couple of years of my life in VR and with the goal of managing my documents and my mind behind this. And I’m not sure it’s like five, six, seven years maybe. And I’m still not 100% sure what I’m holding. Present choice. It’s the most interesting new medium I’ve played with, like no doubt whatsoever. Everything else is into it’s fun, let’s say e-ink and I use it often, but it’s not. It didn’t change my way to think or see the world. It doesn’t. They were not new, the limited new affordances, but it’s not radically new. So I’m still I don’t have an answer to this that is it going to work. I don’t ever know what the if the question there is should I be convinced should you be convinced you just like the most radically new medium where we can do things, whatever those things are, probably structuring and documents, managing information differently. So I think for this, it’s definitely where I have the most curiosity. Will it lead to the most impact? I’m not sure. So my my main bet, let’s say, of the so we have let’s see now I believe we store it through the different ideas and demonstration to have a library of new ways to interact, folding, for example, just showing the different Brandel I think already just having a room showcasing the so small videos like the room of prototype and proof of concept, even if based just on video, to collect them as a palette, let’s say, of interaction could be interesting.

Mark Anderson: And I think what my bet, let’s say, is being a museum curator or librarian, something like this in the sense that you can bring documents around, save their position, pin them, remove the headset, go somewhere else and have it again. So having a very large room with the actual document, you move, save and remove. I think that’s probably the most powerful or interesting interaction. I still don’t know how to sell or showcase that because this we know how to do and we can just use hubs for that, for example. But is it something that can be easily translate from a video or something exciting? Because if people don’t relate to the documents, who if they just see the video but not that they don’t make it to come back, I’m not sure.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. Okay, let me give you a sales pitch then. I’m also reading Adam at the same time. So imagine this. We do exactly what I said. We have a way to get documents in to this space. And these documents have a tremendous. Amount of useful metadata. So in the case of this person, they start with a thing and pull it up, right? First of all, I really think connections is something that is good and VR space, not details, but connections. I think that’s something we share a perspective of, right. So in that document, there will be citations to external research.

Peter Wasilko: Which.

Frode Hegland: Is the library just talked about you and also Adam like. Right. You should be able to when you get to those pages, see that and then somewhere in the distance it’s actually there. So it’s not like click and instantly jump teleport, but you should be able to pull it towards you. That’s really nice. But what I think will happen over time is that if we have the journal in here, the books and lots of our dialogue, when you take the document out in space, you can say, this is the first document in this discussion. Let’s say it’s the actual page document and then all these documents by other people referring to it will be in time. And then you can say kind of the other result over here. That becomes interesting because also the system knows a little bit about people. And to be really even though we want to be about work, not too much social, to have a presence of the rest of the team in the room would be really nice. For instance, in this team, when Fabian was online and Hobbs today, if he had wanted to, in this environment, he should be able to put an icon of himself showing that he’s there.

Frode Hegland: So if one of us was in this community wanted to, we could say hi and join that role. Right. So a little bit of what’s going on. There’s this lovely series on Apple TV called Slow Horses. It’s Spies in London. It’s nice. You should watch it. But there’s this really simple sentence in there where the boss is saying, I want everyone in their desk. Right because they’re all being busy. I want everyone on their desk. If there is a team, you want to know where people are, if they have remote work or whatever, but you don’t always want to expose yourself every single movement to everything, right? It’s too much. So that whole balance between you, let your team know what’s going on. You’re there, but you’re not too much then. So if you combine that with document streams, we can see the connections, pull things out, find out why that was said first. And if that person has said that, blah, blah, blah, blah, we start building this, but I don’t think we can build it just. Yes, Brandel. Thank you for taking your hand up so I can stop talking.

Brandel Zachernuk: So I understand the motivation for for that and for something like a unified approach. In my experience, unifying everything is only a guarantee to crystallize those pieces of functionality into the exact state that they that they have at the time that you sort of imagine them. And so for that reason, I tend to discourage people from putting all of the different bits and pieces of functionality together until they’re actually nailed down. Because when you have one thing on its own, then you can change everything about it in order to tweak it and modify it and understand what sort of the behavioral characteristics of it are. So it would be my preference to have at best a catalog of individual pieces of functionality until one is absolutely convinced of all of those specific pieces of functionality that should be rolled into a piece of actual production software. It’s it’s frustrating because it means that every time you want to have any kind of combinatorial combined prototype of this piece of functionality, that it becomes necessary to kind of put those things together. But that’s still better than the alternative of trying to roll all of the things into one. And yeah, I mean, I’d be curious for Fabian and Adam, their experience with prototyping, but, but I tend to, I heard once somewhere I actually don’t remember where it is. It might be in Buxton sketching user experiences, a prototype could answer a question. And if you don’t know what the one question that a prototype is answering, then it’s not sort of achieving its goal because it’s kind of doing too much.

Frode Hegland: The question that was in the proposal that I emailed is. The document intends to sell something, all documents sell something, a point of view or fact or whatever it is, right? So in the case of this pitch document, it’s trying to sell, giving us money to make VR work better. That’s the case. So the point I think it should solve is that if you open this and VR and let’s pretend the onboarding is better, so let’s pretend we say this up front. This is for a year or two. In the future we put on the headset and it’s just there. You don’t have to do all kinds of nonsense to get it in front of you, but when you have it there, you should instantly see what the points we’re making, how it relates to the rest of the world. The work we have done behind it, it’s presented as a really clear as though you’re going. I used to work in advertising before computers were 100% in advertising. We would have posters on the wall selling to the client. You know, a lot of it is this. This is a document we are trying to sell to them. If they agree that it’s a good sales tool, they may want to use documents like this to sell to others.

Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah. So my apologies for the pessimism, but that’s one that’s not a prototype. That’s a pitch or a demonstration. And to. It’s vastly more work to be able to polish something, to turn that into a presentation that that kind of makes sense for that because you need to do all of the groundwork exploratory work. And to that end, that’s where I think Knowledge Navigator fails, is that it’s it’s not sufficiently well thought out that it sort of passes muster for anybody thinking about those individual moments. And so I don’t I’m not optimistic that that’s achievable. I also work in advertising. And, yes, the clarity that the clarity that is required for being able to do all of those things is is beyond the level of certainty that one should really have at this point about UI sort of methods and interactions that are sort of on offer within the context of virtual reality. And they and advertising essentially necessarily requires the certainty that that probably does more harm than good at this point. So I, I don’t feel great about the idea of being able to achieve a pitch for those things that sort of tells a single journey based on what people know right now, based on basically anybody, anybody knows. I was talking to a media engineer this weekend and he was like, I haven’t seen any work productivity, things that are actually worth using it. And it’s just like, well, that’s sad.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, but the thing is. Um. It’s like, okay. So, yes. Last week we were supposed to dream. Just whatever, get it down. And that was done to different.

Peter Wasilko: Degrees.

Frode Hegland: And, you know, trying to have something a little bit more concrete.

Peter Wasilko: I think.

Frode Hegland: We need to settle on something. And I see a lot of I mean, this is partly why I was very frustrated this weekend. I see a lot of efforts. I don’t see a lot of, however. Right. And I mean, like Brandel what you have done already where the glossary map is fantastic. You know, I find that useful. There’s a few things I’d like to change. Like the origin point is your nose. You know, if the origin was in front of you, a few polishes like that. That in itself, I think is really, really wonderful. And if that could be interactive with different things, it would be powerful in itself. But I mean, we’re all different ages in this group. But I know you work in advertising and you do amazing work, Brandel. But just maybe it’s because I feel like kind of the old guy in the group I was doing. Not that you guys weren’t, but, you know, 320 to 40 QuickTime movies were amazing. You know, and we could see the future in that and all these other things. Now we have this medium. If we do a pitch and a completely fails, it doesn’t fail because it’s truly an experiment. If we can right up. We try to present this and it failed for these reasons that will help us communicate to others what the next steps might be. Right. We said we tried to have a document and we found that that was an absolute waste of time. And that’s a journal article that has real value. You know, and of course, what you guys have been talking about in terms of listing interaction. Yes, we would like to have many of those in the journal, both in the PDF Journal and on the Web or whatever. We want to try to be a resource for people. Absolutely. But can’t we try to find one way to just even if it’s the gosh darn mural? Make the mural or actual sales pitch something because otherwise it’s like we’re promoting something, but we don’t. It’s like we’re interior designers, but we don’t want anyone to see our rooms. Peter.

Peter Wasilko: I think we should focus a little bit on infrastructure. And my notion there is something like an open hyper media approach, but apply it to VR. So somebody has a document, they throw it in. You shouldn’t need to own the document in order to be able to augment it. So maybe when we have a document, we could demonstrate document intake into the system, having a Jeff Raskin style humane identifier that a human can memorize and carry with them across systems get associated with it.

Frode Hegland: But Peter, that’s important work. But infrastructure work is really long term, large and.

Peter Wasilko: Deep.

Frode Hegland: And it’s not a pitch. Right. The reason I’m talking about having a pitch is that we do this document with all kinds of intellectual stuff, including what you said about infrastructure, saying it has to be made. But the idea is someone who is skeptical puts it on and says, och, I literally see things differently now. I didn’t realize the value of. So and.

Peter Wasilko: So.

Frode Hegland: And to have a normal document in there decomposed so that, you know, first of all, they get the benefit of many screens. And then the other one is they can see things connected.

Peter Wasilko: Hmm. I think the sweet spot, though, is going to be textually interacting with the VR space. Trying to build custom widgets for every single thing you might want to do is going to be very time consuming and frustrating if we have a language oriented approach to how we want to drive the thing. I think there’s a lot of value there.

Frode Hegland: But Peter, with all loving respect, you have to put the headset on to kind of know what we’re talking about. And we can have a discussion about it, but because we aren’t taught, it is like writing a book about a painting or talking about a song or whatever cross media analogy you want to have, right? We a lot of frustration, all of us I think have is that a lot of the things that could be better in VR if done well in VR would also be better traditionally. Right. Have a couple of big monitors. We all agree on that. So we we do have a strong feeling. That there is something, right? Yeah. Describing a pizza. Yeah, that’s. That’s a good example. So. So that’s why. And I think Fabian and Brandel, you’re being really annoying because you actually know too much. In a way. I don’t think you appreciate the fresh perspective of us who more recently have come in. Because what is most impressive about VR now from when I show people it’s the goddamn lobby. You sit in that room and you look around and you have this screen with apps on it, that’s great. But to actually feel that sense of presence is tremendous. You can’t do anything.

Brandel Zachernuk: But just said that’s an issue. I was never compelled by the lobby. I’ve tried VR since I’ve touched the minutes, but my brother got an Oculus DK one and it was completely bland and I was absolutely disinterested in it the first time that I liked cardboard and things like that, and I started trying to write word processors for it in 2015. But yeah, the first thing that actually made me drop money on because I had to buy a computer for it as well, was the HTC Vive. I didn’t have I didn’t have a VR PC at that time. And it was it was the input. It was the capacity to be able to move things around to have six degrees of freedom but also have full six degrees of freedom with with the with the five controllers as well. And at that point, I don’t believe that even WebEx was available, but I was too excited about the possibilities to pass it up because because of the opportunities that were sort of inherent in being able to actually manipulate objects. So yeah, it’s interesting you say that, that from your experience, the most impressive thing is I’m also utterly hostile to the concept of presence and virtual body ownership and all of those phrases that people kind of apply, possibly because I’m so disinterested in myself as a human being, not like in any sort of dangerous way, but just like what I am is a camera in real life for the most part. And, and what I’m more interested in is a vantage point from which to manipulate. And so, yeah, it is, it is, it is vastly valuable. It’s just interesting to hear that.

Frode Hegland: But I mean, it’s also I haven’t had the opportunity to show people like Beat Saber, you know, people are super impressed with that as a game. But for instance, you know, Marcus worked with the whole nodal thing to do, the visualization of the hypertext thing, very useful work, but it has limitations. You have done the glossary in space. I mean, it isn’t one of the most obvious things to have something in space that can be manipulated because yes, the manipulation, once you touch something and move it is absolutely amazing. There’s no question. Couldn’t we as a community figure out how to start testing around that? It doesn’t have to be a rectangular document that is not know. That is one strong thought I have. But if if all we have is, let’s say, building on Rendell’s work with the glossary from visual metal and what, let’s say for the sake of making it really powerful, one of those nodes can spawn a mural on the wall behind it, something like that. Basically taking the sugar we have. But saying this is based on real knowledge. That is part of the journal, which is part of our our work. It’s not nothing, guys. It’s actually quite impressive what we already have. Sorry, Mark. Your yellow hand. Sorry.

Mark Anderson: Sorry. Yes. Take a little yellow hand down. Well, one thing I quickly say is because we were talking about initial impressions. I was talking with some folks this morning. And actually the thing that people get most excited about isn’t the presence is actually the boundary in the Oculus. You can actually break the fourth wall and you can look outside things like if you’re a certain age, you can find your glasses to put them on when you take the headset off. And actually, I mean, it sounds trite, actually. It’s the most. I think that was the most wonderful thing. When I got to put it on, I thought, I know I was impressed that I didn’t think I was in a really manufactured space. That was impressive compared to all the things I’ve seen. But actually just this thing. I can still stick my hands through the wall and find stuff and use the pass through. Sort of almost made it more impressive. But the point I set my hand up was, was to circle back to the thing that. So we’ve done a number of things we have done and we are looking at a number of things to to sort of put some points to it in terms of the demo and what you want to do for vintage smile that you’re probably the best placed person in the room to know the kind of things that they’re sort of interested in, because it’s probably not just a matter of, you know, I just think of all the super interactions and things, for instance, that Adam and Fabian and Brandel have done.

Mark Anderson: But it might be, it might be, as Trish is just connecting them, doing them with the right bit of data in context, because I do rather Fabian just posted the video. I do. I do onboarding. I do first time demos of people and I do a lot of that with the Tinderbox community, just to remind me of just actually how complex the tool is. And of course, the more you use it, the more you forget what you’re interesting. You forget wasn’t what wasn’t a way of fact when you started. The things that you probably find most impressive after some use aren’t the things that strike you an immediate thing. So the question is what we give them allied with the the demos or the the tools or the practices we show, what’s the information environment we want them to be doing it. You know, if we talk to them about a subject that does particularly interest in, it won’t help. And I don’t suggest we take something so large as the fact that climate is out of control and things because it’s too large. But there may be something that is more a more approachable level space to them. And I think. Effectively taking that and maybe then reworking it back into even some of the existing stuff we’ve done just so it’s it’s more tailored maybe may be useful.

Frode Hegland: I have to ask everyone a really important question, and that is, is there an interest in building a thing rather than continuing with smaller experiments, as is happening now, and putting that together to help us as a community, say, we’re interested in documents. We are.

Peter Wasilko: In work.

Brandel Zachernuk: I’m happy to help people with that, but it’s not something that particularly aligns with any goals that I have. I work in big tech and I will continue to work in big tech. And to the extent that I’m this is working toward my goals, it’s just to spread awareness essentially about what are the opportunities for data visualization in VR and to sort of marry up the perspective of the future of text with some of the technical underpinnings that can support it. It’s at this point the sort of the financial, but also substantially sort of strategic and philosophical benefits of being attached to a big tech platform with a big, long plan are simply too great for it to be important for me to try to seek funding for an independent body to do that.

Frode Hegland: Just on the whole funding thing, I’m not trying to get a salary for myself or anyone here. I’m just trying unless someone needs it and which we’ll try to do. All I’m trying to do is so that we can talk and have ideas and then we can outsource programming so that you guys do the fun stuff. That’s really what it is about. And a little bit to help us with the outreach, because Phil asked me today what I want to do. You know, we’re having a friendly chat about all kinds of things. And I said, I want to highlight to people that working in VR can be powerful. So I think we actually have exactly the same goal that whether this is the same overlap place to do it is the question. So we’re not talking about a pitch. It’s not like let’s make a lab work in Palo Alto and, you know, B PARC, Xerox PARC. Again, all of that might be lovely, but it’s not really realistic. So I’m just talking about instead of I mean, like Fabian, look at him, he’s got 1 million demos on Twitter. It’s fantastic. And we need a library to help communicate those. But it would be amazing to have an actual pitch. To say here is your. If you think it’s all metaverse and gaming. Come in here, spend 5 minutes. Literally, look around a little bit and maybe you get a feel for more. That’s it. Peter.

Peter Wasilko: I like to see a test bed in which we can integrate all of our little demos. I want to be working so that any code that I wrote, Fabian can pick it up, Brundle can pick it up, and it can all be in the same environment or just have hooks for it to interoperate. Tinderbox is the perfect example. What other program exists where Mark hasn’t been able to implement an auto sync for files yet, but the program has the capability to hook out to the command line so that I can then build my little command line compiled module. The tinderbox can call and I can effectively implement on my own the missing piece of functionality that I want other people to be pulled into the main repeater.

Frode Hegland: That is a really long term big thing. Right. But, you know, talking about command line and hooking and putting things together, it is a little out of scope for what we’re looking at now. I don’t just want to find out in this session what kind of working relationship we want to have, especially in the short term, to make sure that people don’t feel pushed into any direction that are not interested in. Yeah. And then we’ll look at Adam’s comment.

Mark Anderson: So actually, to to go on the Pietrus comment before answering, I want that to in fact, I use the auto structure information, manage my notes, which represent my ideas, but my goals will be or and being more structured with my thoughts is to get more ideas, better ideas. So in the end, I don’t care for bio. I care for the possibilities of what that could and hopefully will be able to do with it. And part of it is not just giving you, let’s say, a list of prototypes with sometimes metadata like the visual or name or you’re done. But if I could bring two different prototypes and mash them together and have a third one, that’s my dream. And I hope VR as a better way to think and organize my thoughts will help me to avoid that. But it’s actually that’s the actual goal for me. And I think for most of us like this, either writing a paper or editing a journal or building more prototypes, in the end, it’s being more creative but with deep stuff, not something shallow. And which brings me to how I think, to answer the question it could be done is and also to go back on Randall’s comment, I don’t think it’s realistic to bring all the prototypes together as one functionally speaking. I think it’s really hard because we all use different tools, different data set, all that. I wish again that would be my goal, but I don’t know how to do that yet. I don’t know if it’s possible.

Mark Anderson: I really want to, but I don’t know how. So that’s why I suggested the visual palette. That’s why I was thinking about either 2D images or even short videos. But I think this might be a bit too much like throwing game for Blender in someone’s face and say, okay, learn the interface that don’t work and there is no menu. I don’t want to do this, but if they use those maybe with just a name, it’s a visual of such tool represented by one of the prototypes, let’s say a dozen or two dozen we’ve done. And against a process we’ll go. Let’s say my goal is I have 20 pieces of information. I want to organize them because I have a paper to deliver next week and then people would be able to take that prototype, snap it against the wall to say on step three and then maybe name that step. I would use such tool that that I believe could help to say, okay, we need, for example, for such process or goal those three prototypes, this one maybe we don’t need, maybe this one is optional. So we need those two prototypes to work together. And that would be really valuable to, again, that one specific goal. And that’s of course much more limited. But I think it’s still composable help us to tinker with and then we can talk about making one demo that has at least some of the functionality from two or three of those products.

Peter Wasilko: Yeah. I mean.

Frode Hegland: I do. I mean, currently the journal is nothing. You know, Mark and I worked on it. There’s some good stuff, but it’s the beginning. When I think about the Journal, I do think about a year’s worth of content, and I do think we need to be more exciting than just PDF. So it should be a showcase for what you’re talking about. There’s no question about that. And it’s really, really important that we all experiment in different ways with different media, VR, Photoshop, whatever. I take that as a given, but I also. Desperately think that there might be something that will deal with our own work that is relatively reasonable for you guys who are the programmers.

Peter Wasilko: To build.

Frode Hegland: What Brandel is already built with the map into VR is for me. Obviously it’s based on my documents. Of course I have a special fondness for it, but it also has, if that can be made interactive in VR. You know, and shareable. If we can somehow find a way that all we have is a way where we have our glossaries and we edit it, in this space, we can make an incredible sculpture. Potentially. Of what we think. You know, that is a useful thing. And, you know, I do use Amherst every once in a while to write. So even just having a screen in a nice environment and VR I find is actually helpful. It helps me concentrate. So, you know, I know that there’s a lot of experience and wisdom here, but kind of the reluctance to, you know, we have a month, let’s try to put together we put that on their head and they say something relative to what they just read. And it’s really cool. But it’s, you know, even if it is literally the document spread out on a mural, just all the pages so they can walk up and down and read the document because reading a document and it’s skimming way is better like that than going, you know, like that. There’s got to be something to help people enter, not just let’s play a bang bang game. All right, guys.

Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah. And that’s what I’m sort of exploring. I. So again. Oh, he must have accidentally clicked the leave instead of the joint. I almost did it this morning, so it’s fresh in my mind that the UX for that kind of sucks. I think I don’t know anybody from Zoom, so there’s nobody I could complain to about it. We use WebEx at work, and. And one of the main detractors of WebEx now works at Apple rather than WebEx, specifically, because he was so frustrated with it and has actually managed to fix it in a lot of ways, to the extent that it’s possible through the API, which is nice. Yeah. Mean that’s what I am exploring with the sort of the moment to moment sort of bits and pieces. I think that I do agree that that a pitch is a valuable thing. I think it can consist of videos and descriptions and visual storyboards and things like that. I think that there is a range of fidelity. There’s a range of fidelity that that a story can be told with. And, yeah, that’s that’s how things like movies are made and that’s how things like video games are made.

Brandel Zachernuk: You see things like brown box prototyping. There’s a really great game called I Expect You to Die. It’s sort of like, No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die kind of thing. And and it was made by this organization, Shell Games, started by Jesse Schell, who is a Disney Imagineer, one of the founding sort of people involved with with Disney VR in the nineties, they spent millions of dollars building something that was essentially equivalent to an Xbox in 92. And he and the way they prototyped it was with cardboard, literal cardboard, not not Google cardboard. They cut out pieces of cardboard and they held it at different distances in order to verify the sort of the experience of reachability and things like that. And so while I definitely agree that it is important to have something that’s up to the fidelity of people, the best way to think is by being able to kind of reach across all of those across those levels of visual fidelity in order to identify something that tells that coherent story and that you’re better working across those levels of fidelity to develop the thing than you are trying to reach into it.

Frode Hegland: Immediately in terms of prototyping. Absolutely. That’s really, really important.

Brandel Zachernuk: But no, I in terms of storyboarding, storyboarding and pitching as well, I think that you can’t skip. I mean, it’s just like, Marc, you can’t skip stages and in marketing history.

Frode Hegland: Obviously you have vast experience, you know what you’re talking about.

Peter Wasilko: But.

Frode Hegland: You know, like Phil Gooch today, very, very intelligent guy. You know, he has done amazing stuff with data. He put on the headset today and it was like, okay, I get it.

Brandel Zachernuk: That’s great.

Frode Hegland: It has to be on your head. I mean, you are in a specific kind of intelligence. I’m not just giving you praise. You you have a very specific insight. You understand a lot further about this in terms of embodiment and a lot of different things. But I think that for the average Joe, even the average clever Joe. We got to find a reason to put it on their head. And when they got it on their head, it’s got to be a work thing. It doesn’t have to be elaborate, but it shouldn’t just be a random thing. I really think it should relate to either the pitch itself or to our work or something, so that I can say, Well, this is a different experience. That’s it. It can be over in 5 minutes. You know, and just seeing their hands and being able to move something, I completely agree. It’s wonderful when that works and it does work. Well, now we get that kind of for free, obviously.

Peter Wasilko: Sorry.

Mark Anderson: I’m sorry. Well, the thing I was going to ask and I’ll pick up something you’ve just mentioned. The first thing was, I just wondered if there’s an easy way to make some sort of a wrapper or even like an app that is essentially just an easy way for us to point something to the repository of all these basically prototypes and bits of the jigsaw puzzle that we have so that we can rapidly build towards it. And within that playpen, do some of the description that people have been making out. I really do get the point of being able to say, well, look, this this demo is doing, this is it’s basically building on these principles or it’s using this bit of tool because that can be quite useful to a lot of people that might save somebody else an awful lot of time figuring out figuring out to redo it a different way or that or they, they see something that’s actually working a way that they hadn’t hitherto imagined. So I don’t know. I don’t have the smarts to do that. But I’m just wondering if there is any easy way other than just having a sort of a URL that points to something to a site that links to others. So I’ll let somebody say, well, that’s stupid or not. Just going back to the point about the demo, I just just sort of return to the notion of thinking, okay, so what, what of the things that we’ve shown.

Peter Wasilko: Are.

Mark Anderson: Special to VR other than being in VR. So when I put this on, apart from saying, wow, this is different and yes, there’s something here, what can I do? In a in a fairly utilitarian work sense. That I just can’t do sat at a desk because that’s one of the hurdles that essentially you just described. We’ve got to get over because it’s sort of the ennui thing of, oh, yes, it’s VR. And I sort of seen a number of people say, oh, this is really interesting. And then we have a what do I do with it? Other than obviously things like games and entertainment. If they’re if they’re if you don’t have a sufficiently personal itch to scratch or a particular problem. So I just might come back to the notion of, you know, there’s some really interesting demos that people have done here and things. And I’m just but I’ve not used the medium enough to know which of those are sufficiently unusual.

Peter Wasilko: To put from. Well, so.

Brandel Zachernuk: From my perspective, so it’s the the three plus degrees of freedom or the six degrees of freedom, control of points in space is the really novel thing. So I think I showed you the folding. I’m not sure. Did you see the folding of a mural? Anyway, I had I had the I built the ability a while ago, a couple of weeks ago before before the Game Developers Conference, the ability to using sliders to pick a place on a mural. I haven’t put a proper information mural and it’s something very junky instead. But, but having the ability to kind of close it in and last night I have put it put it in the ability. And one of the things that’s really interesting about that is actually how how bad it is. So I put the link in here. 2022 folding. So this is the link here and you can left click and right click to move these things around. And perhaps actually the specifically how bad it is to use ambiguity is what’s important about how good it is in 3D. So right now in this thing here we have these two locators that represent one’s left and right hands. And then you have to you’ve got to click these checkboxes in the top right. Four is left pinching and then is right. And then once you move them together, then you end up with a fold. I can I can share my screen, actually, to describe this feeling.

Brandel Zachernuk: Um. Let’s go here. So, yeah. So when when you have so you have these two, these two things. And in VR, they do represent what they are supposed to represent. So that’s my left hand. That’s my right hand. And if you click is left pinching. And that’s doing that. In theory, that should be able to move the mural around to the quarterback and stuff like that. But I’ve got that yet, but I feel like that would be a good addition. And then what if we cut it is right pinching. What happens is that it’s effectively gripping the. My computer crashed when my phone crashed. I will have to restart my phone and see where I can get it. When you have both of them clicked, then that invokes a grip on both of those parts. And then it means that you have those as fixed points and you can pull them together. And I don’t know why it can’t handle it. I guess I’ll just have to force quick chrome. And that means that you can pinch a small piece together or you can pinch a larger piece together and you can pinch it partially and you can pinch it all of the way. What it doesn’t let you do quite yet is have the ability to. To. Well, I’ve destroyed my computer and my. You can still hear me.

Peter Wasilko: On on my screen. Your face is frozen, but I heard you.

Brandel Zachernuk: Okay. I think I’m just sort of stressing my computer and invisibly. So perhaps I want. Oh, so it means that you can kind of pull things together with a small amount? Yeah, it would be really nice to be able to invoke multiple folds, possibly recursively, to be able to put those things in there. But but I don’t have that yet. But so the point I was making is that looking at how ungainly that kind of functionality is within a 2D window perspective and you could put locks on the on the points in situ or something in order to smooth it up. But it’s an incredibly unwieldy sort of mode and premise for interaction almost comically so when you’re in a 2D environment looking at a 3D film. And yet when we’re in 3D, it’s very, very easy to take that approach of being able, particularly get feedback that if I hold here, hold here, hold together, then then you have the ability to do it. And the same with that, that data carpet or whatever I called it last year where I took the 3D sort of map of each 2D thing, is that the frequency over time of the occurrence of a given word, just the sheer fluidity and reflexive expressiveness of being able to move your hands around and see results like that. That’s what I think is what it’s best at. And having a having a stereoscopic three dimensional vantage point, six degrees of freedom from which to be able to view those results. So so to your point, Mark, what is it that’s good about being and VR? Is it is just being in VR, but to unpack it a little bit, it’s to be able to move your vantage point around while you’re undergoing, while you’re undertaking specific expressive movements that that have a particular semantic significance within the context.

Peter Wasilko: Well, I’m trying. I’m imagining what I would do with the whole thing. Um, when, let’s say creating a mural or investigating a part of a mural. So it seems to would seem to be the advantage would be the rapid ability to focus in on a particular point. To bring it to bring it bring up more much more detail. Is that what you would imagine would be used, the folding would be used for? Yeah.

Brandel Zachernuk: I think it’s the it’s the immediate juxtaposition of specific components of of the view. So if you have to sort of temporally, temporally disparate sort of moments that you want to kind of investigate. Being able to bring them together or close them over.

Peter Wasilko: All right. Yeah. All right. That would that’s. You’re right. That’s extremely hard to do in. Illustrator, which I use. Adobe Illustrator. It’s very hard. I have to go. I have to go back and forth or I have to extract two different things, put them in a in a in a different document. Put them close together. Yeah.

Brandel Zachernuk: That’s right. Yeah. And so if you want to be able to compare and contrast those things, then, then not not only is this not a bad faith representation, it’s, it’s, it’s one of the least worst in terms of representing that. And so having having the ability to do that means that it’s because it’s simply like there are ways of achieving things that are conceptually similar to this that can be done in two dimensions. Oh, they’re stuck together.

Frode Hegland: No, look, I really need to know. I don’t understand this because today I’ve seen real reticence from Adam, Fabian and Brandel in putting together some sort of a pitch. Yet you’re spending so much time and effort making an incredible what used to be a mural, which is now something far beyond a mural, doing the kind of thing you’re doing there. Right. So so my question is, what is the reticence? But I think we should do something more than only a single mural with text on it for a pitch. But why is there such you know, it’s like you guys know more than anyone the power of pinching that mural towards you and away from you and doing all these things. You know what’s so well? Why is there such a strong reticence to use this plus as a way for people to understand that work and be are.

Brandel Zachernuk: Um, I’ve I’ve been I had a startup out of university. We were involved in chasing money.

Peter Wasilko: I can’t see who’s talking.

Brandel Zachernuk: That was Frodo. Oh, sorry. I’ll stop. Um. That was Rhoda. I was saying. I was saying. So I. I had a start up out of university where we chased money to do things, and it was and it was hard, and it, frankly, got in the way of the things that I wanted to do. If I don’t need money for things, then I would I would be I would I would rather spend the time doing the thinking than trying to get the money.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, but okay. Brandel forget the money in a sense, because the only reason I want to get some money is that so you guys don’t have to do boring stuff, but if you want to do boring stuff as well, that’s fine. I am not looking for a salary for B, I don’t need it. I just don’t have money to waste. So when I’m talking about a pitch, what I am talking about a pitch is to sell the notion that it can be powerful to work and be ah. That’s the whole thing I’m selling. I’m not selling a company. Right. So I’m wondering why you guys today is so kind of like this when when what you have is so wonderful. It’s like, I’m not preaching to the converted. I’m literally taking the priest who is you guys shaking them up and down and saying, Can we please have a little bit of a gospel? Fabian, you first since you haven’t spoken in a while.

Mark Anderson: I actually did. I think I did clarify a bit last week what I thought would be the next step toward this. For me at least. I know I build a lot of not or not not as many as I want, but I built quite a few prototypes and demos and everything because it’s not clear what the actual process, like a step by step process to what a goal would be, because then it becomes, quote unquote, just implementation doesn’t mean it’s easier or harder, just it’s a very different process to say, okay, we have the specification for this piece of software, we have this deadline, we have this many people on the team doing this and this and that versus something that is a lot more fluid where we don’t actually have a clearly outlined goal. We don’t even know if we have the goal. We don’t see what the tools are for that goal. And that’s why I mentioned last week and maybe the week before that, how I met. I basically need to sketches, visuals of how no matter how ugly, even if it’s made with Lego blocks or chalk on the wall or whatever, and the goal toward the seven, if they were challenged every step of the way. But basically, in order for me to project toward, let’s say, a pitch that needs more doing to we’re going to do, I don’t know, let’s say an HTML document or a PDF about a mural about global warming or about VR or about whatever. Designing this designing that the goal will be, reorganizing the table of content, for example, for example. And then I can start to project if there are not some of those, even if they were wrong decision in the sense that they get challenged further down the line, then it’s it’s too unclear for me. So that’s why.

Frode Hegland: This is exactly what those are. If I had your French accent, it would be exactly my words.

Peter Wasilko: Right.

Frode Hegland: If we can just settle on something. Right. And I think the mural should be part of it because what you’re doing is amazing with the mural, but not only the mural because it’s literally flat. I think we need to find a way to use a bit of the third dimension, and I think it would be great if it’s connected to this, as I call it, a sales pitch. But let’s really remember that it is a philosophy pitch, right? So if we could just if, for instance, for, for instance, just opening up, I don’t know.

Peter Wasilko: It’s so. I’m sorry I came late for this, but what I understand is that. There’s an assumption that I think that the proposal that that president has been writing is coming along very well as as a proposal for a for for funding. So what I understand is that what we’re talking about here is whether or not and a demo is needed to be a part of that proposal. And if so, if the answer is yes to that, then what should be in the demo? Am I am I in right orientation here?

Frode Hegland: Yes.

Peter Wasilko: Thank you.

Frode Hegland: But for some reason, there is an absolute. I mean, this weekend, as you saw, I emailed you guys saying, I need a break. You know, I’m literally going to have a heart attack over this. And I may have to take that break because that is exactly the question that I’m asking. Exactly that. And, you know, I see on I see on Twitter, I see these things you guys are doing. But for some reason, there is a steadfast refusal to connect that to our philosophy presentation thing. Right? I mean, I just don’t I yeah.

Peter Wasilko: I guess it’s.

Frode Hegland: Just the actual document spread out page by page. Even that itself, I think, would help people understand VR for work, not just VR for social VR for games. It’s being done. Nobody is selling VR for work other than having your monitor in there.

Peter Wasilko: And so another. So another assumption is that in this meeting. Someone needs to propose? Definitely. Something to be in the the demo.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. I’ve done that. I’ve emailed.

Peter Wasilko: That. Who has proposed that. I mean I’m sorry I.

Frode Hegland: I emailed another one this morning about documents with full metadata so we can see how they’re connected and we can have a dialogue that.

Peter Wasilko: Way that it’s got to be which document.

Frode Hegland: Starting with a pitch document. Right. So you have that. But from that, you can easily see all the things that make it happen. All the citations are connected with lines, all the journal articles, the things are happening to all the research is connected visually, that kind of a thing. The idea with the document universe is that someone writes a thing. To the group. Someone replies, You can be on paper. Computer doesn’t really matter, but in the VR space you can see the thread over time and who wrote back? So you have an amazing citation analysis system that can help you check the veracity of the final document. That was the proposal. I’m not saying we have to do that, but since you asked, has there been a proposal? That is one proposal.

Peter Wasilko: So. It would be helpful to be able to to have that as as as a word that says this is the proposal for the document to be in the. What are you calling the demo? And then we can then then you can ask us, do we agree or not? And if we do not agree, then we ask for someone else to propose a document that should be in the demo. It’s hard to have just general discussion about these and classes of these things. But Bob, for me, at least, it’s only three. I’m sorry. I’m. I’m. It’s really hard for me to get. But you know, if that’s what if that’s what I was at, that’s why I asked about the assumptions about what we’re doing here today.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, we’re trying to do that. We’re trying to adjust that. But there’s a combination of things. People here communicate in different ways. Some people like to do demos. I’d like to do writing, some like the discussion and so on, right? So for some reason there is a bit of a breakdown around the idea of having an artifact. Let’s just call it an artifact or an environment for someone who may want to invest, not necessarily money that could also invest that exposure and introductions to other groups. Right. But it literally is something like that.

Brandel Zachernuk: And so so back to being selfish. But again, that just doesn’t really align with any of my needs or goals. I don’t like I said, I don’t need the world to know about this. I just need a core community of people to be able to share concepts and possibilities with.

Frode Hegland: But I can see the value. What I’m saying. Brandel. Sorry for interrupting you, but I’m saying that I’m not saying we necessarily have to get everyone’s cousin involved, but I’m talking about the work that you are doing that Adam and Fabian are doing. Put it in a coherent context so that people.

Brandel Zachernuk: But why? Why? Why bother? What does it achieve? I have people to talk to about it right now. I don’t actually need, like, an entire because all I need to do is have enough people to work through the ideas of what it is that’s beneficial. Once those things are worked out, then absolutely. But to the point that that Adam has of saying that before convincing venting needs to be able to convince himself. Same like I think that there is a lot I don’t really want to take people on that path unless I need to because one, I’m convinced or to because I made them. And if I don’t need them to do the thinking, I don’t need to. I’ve already got you guys. I’ve got I have I have a core group of people who are invested in understanding and pursuing these things. And I would love to I would love to give you a demo of some of these things. And they are sometimes if you’re still in the Bay Area. But that’s I don’t need a big a big demo until until I’ve got a little a little bit more nailed down. And perhaps that’s too conservative in terms of the audiences that it’s appropriate to reach. But I think that the mother of all demos was 68 when when when augmenting human intellect was 62. That’s that’s a long time between those things. And I think that he probably dug had a lot of certainty about what he was delivering by that point.

Frode Hegland: No, he didn’t. What Doug did was demos, demos, demos, demos. It would film the screen of early tests. It would go to Michigan, where they were starting the ARPA network. It would show a video, and then he would show it frame by frame. The only time Doug ever had any success with demos. Sorry for my tone. I’m really trying to constrain it. But it was demos. It wasn’t words, it was demos, demos, demos. Even a 62 paper with Joe is around the notion of a demo. Right. And I think we do have slightly different goals because we don’t have the kind of time frame, you know, Moore’s Law is happening. Your company will produce an amazing piece of hardware in a year or two that suddenly a lot of people will have it for different things. And what I am absolutely scared of is the imagination loss, because truth kills creativity. You know, look at the innovation on flat screens for text over the last 30 years underlined web links.

Peter Wasilko: That’s it’s.

Frode Hegland: Right. I honestly think that if we don’t think together and I mean, like the stuff that you’re doing with the folding of the mural is absolutely brilliant. Right. Like when Adam did it. Like the physics thing of it. Absolutely brilliant. Right? Why the.

Peter Wasilko: Hell.

Frode Hegland: Hide it, people?

Peter Wasilko: Look.

Frode Hegland: Just ten more seconds and I’ll give you the mike. Mark. But what I’m trying to say is you guys are doing absolute. I will have to say it this way. It’s fucking intellectual gold. And I’m not saying everyone has to say it, but I really think that in a year or two, if there isn’t a place to go for someone to experience some of this, they’re not going to have the intellectual bandwidth to understand the imagination behind it. I mean, I am lucky. I have one thing most people don’t have. That is time. I can afford to spend the time on this. You know, I don’t have the big brains for it, but I do have some time. And even.

Peter Wasilko: Me.

Frode Hegland: With the freedom to to have the imagination for it, I’m having the same problems as you guys. I don’t know what’s best in VR, but I feel we need to highlight your work and we need to experiment in an open way.

Mark Anderson: Mark So with that thought in mind, something I am practically doing because I can’t build, I can’t build things like Brendan does, but what I can do is to pick up phobias. I can make Lego blocks that they can build, stuff they can rapidly put on top of that, which is why well, I’ve started I’m a good way into Bob’s mirror at the moment. I’ve got about 290 notes at the moment, extracted bits of text and immediately and I found 20 references that I then don’t have the references for which are mentioned. So part of this idea, going back to your thing about document and following the links, well, this is the sort of idea and it was partly I mean, when I first saw that, I thought, all right, so here we are. We have a we actually have a picture of people engaged in pictures, but it got it’s got lots of text in it. And then I saw Adam’s little demo where he was. He was basically putting some numbers over, putting some dates over there. Okay. Well, let’s let’s let’s amp that up a bit. Let’s extract the text. And if it transpires that I don’t think there is the source text. So effectively what I’m doing, the I’m doing the road work of basically extracting all the text back out the diagram. And I don’t mind doing that because then we’ve got the text that is in the, as it were, the fixed representation.

Mark Anderson: Now we have the loose bits that we can do the, the, the exploratory demo work of the very kind that you’re talking about because you look at this and someone said picture, okay, but get this, I can take the timeline out or I can, I can show you the I can show you the network of all the references that come out from this. Now, that’s something you can’t easily do at the moment. And those tools and the extra dimension gives us a chance. Things like the pinch mechanism that Brandon’s talking about gives us an opportunity to show the manual dexterity part, which is difficult in the PTD. So I don’t think actually we’re that far away from things and the stuff that I’m talking about can be part of the package of the document that starts your demo. So I really don’t I don’t quite see the disconnect. I’m just one of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing is that there is a it’s one thing to say, right, let’s take this and deconstruct and turn in something. So the bit I’m doing at the moment is trying to get something that I can then give to guys like Fabian, Adam and Brandel and say, Go fill your boots and just tell me if if you need more metadata or a different metadata. Because one of the things I’ve been scratching my head on is how do I mark against the original PDF, which is like this fixed picture where this text came from, how do I ID that? So when we come to do the clever stuff, how do we know how as we pull away from a fixed document and in your mind’s eye, it could be a letter, it could be a spreadsheet.

Mark Anderson: It’s all the same thing, really, as I pull away from that fixed form that we used to in to 2D world, how do things know where they came from and get back to them as we do all these clever transforms? So that’s why I’m looking ahead down the line saying, okay, as well as the hard work that goes into actually just making the the software to do all these amazing interactions, the next stage to make it into something more fully formed is to put some sort of data on that acts as the bridge between in this case the fixed artifact that you sit see on the wall behind Bob at the moment and the really cool demo that we might do for somebody because I keep coming back to this thing that the thing that the challenge we have is not to make people think that VR is great, but can I, can I do something other than play games in it? And I think this is this is a reasonable example of of showing something that. Otherwise exists as a flat.

Mark Anderson: Document with total purpose. It’s existed. It’s out there and it does so. So we know it has value, but we can actually, in a sense, add value to it because another interesting thing we can do because it has a the other interesting to me is it has a temporal aspect. It was written circa 2004. Bob May correct me. I think it’s sort of 2004 was about when it was written. Well, it’s 2022 now. So that that that also allows us to do some probably some interesting exploration. You know, what’s changed, what hasn’t. And I’m not saying that with any intention. There may there may be no change. But in a sense, part of the part of the thing that will be very difficult to do with that picture now, because you’d have to do that all in the mind’s eye abstraction. But we can probably do something clever, you know, with this as a backdrop. So whether it’s a mural or a spreadsheet or something to me is actually fairly immaterial. What I see is the ability to do data transformations in a meaningful way using the six degrees of freedom that we don’t have in the flat world. And I think that gets you very close to a good, solid part of the sort of overall pitch that you might be posting in your demo. Whether that makes sense to people, I don’t know, but I’ve put that out there.

Peter Wasilko: I will just add one thing to this, and that is that, as I understand it, the British government announced the other day that they were going to add 40 or so new nuclear plants in the next 50 years. That makes it extremely relevant to the political decision making of today. All I have to say on that. Oh, and for for my friend Mark, please keep the the subheadings, the bold subheadings in there. That’s what everybody else likes. All right. Okay, great.

Mark Anderson: It’s happening quickly. And if I may, I don’t know what the question of Fabian is. The data that I’m generating, does that strike you as actually of any use at all? I mean, I may I’ve just started the deconstruction, so I’ll finish it now anyway. But maybe, maybe I’ve gone off on a complete tangent, but I just figured I might be able to give you stuff that you don’t have to generate that you know, is in a sense has is real facts of something real that you can then basically just pull into your into your basically used to close some of your prototypes. And the bit I don’t know is whether you need it in JSON or whether you need it next HTML or something. I can probably figure most of those out. So what I’m really what I’m really trawling for here is at the moment, I’m just extracting bits of text into a into a bucket. The next stage is to figure out how I give them back to you in a way that’s useful for exploratory prototyping work. And I’m open to suggestions.

Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah. It’s useful to have that data. At this point, I don’t have a particular view of of an interaction that demands it. But I’m open to ideas. I think. Like what I need depends on what what anybody wants to do with it, what kind of data transformations and interactions are necessary and desirable to kind of support. But I definitely think having a large enough corpus that it’s not a toy problem. One of the things that I don’t want to do is is vectors, dynamic land, which at many times and some of those other things which are just too simple to be to get tangled. And I think that it’s valuable to to make sure that one keeps a particular modality honest in terms of what it’s going to be up against, in terms of the sheer complexity, as you’ve discovered, Mark, with no to your citation things that that particular thing, whatever it does satisfy, it probably doesn’t do a good enough job of that to be in its current form, to be able to kind of provide much conceptual support. And so some level of abstraction may be necessary to do that. So, so to that end, but like I said, I don’t have a particular I mean, I actually don’t know what I want to do next. I think it would be nice maybe. I mean, one thing that I could do is move some stuff around so that you can actually pinch and move some things in the liquid map. But yeah, I don’t there’s not a particular thing to them.

Mark Anderson: I mean, I’ve also got as far as testing, I took some as it happened to have a tinderbox document that’s neither here nor there. I basically took a spatial map there to worked it back into some JSON, put that back into a basically a brand new liquid document. And I got that to show up in your demo thing, which is quite interesting though. I couldn’t get the overlays to work because it’s obviously it’s obviously requires something more than just the JSON, probably something that’s being taken out of the FD, I don’t know. But but again, I’m, I’m open to try. I just keep making the thing the bit that I can do because I can’t program stuff for toffee. But what I am very used to doing is managing data. And the other thing that sticks with me is that think back to some large infrastructure projects I’ve worked on and indeed my world a couple of years back now. But doing stuff up in in London, the Cabinet Office, and just thinking the way the state of the art is, is actually worse than 2D. It’s spray glue and coloured paper that that’s how that’s how antediluvian sort of a lot of this stuff is. So actually being able to take the information that people do have now and it’s in Microsoft Office Cloud or it’s in Google Cloud, whatever, and do more with it in the sort of way that we’ve been talking about. Deconstructing things strikes me as actually enormously powerful.

Frode Hegland: Right. So running out of time, I see Fabian here and looking at Adam. Okay, so the thing that some of you guys don’t seem to understand is that Mark and I don’t program. And I write articles and I send articles and I share articles. No one ever comments. There’s been one comment from you, Bob, and one from you, Mark. That’s it, right? So that’s why a demo is so important. So the rest of us can be part of this. I cannot do things in Photoshop or on cardboard.

Peter Wasilko: Why not?

Frode Hegland: That’s part of if it’s not, you’re.

Adam Wern: In or you say you’re an artist.

Frode Hegland: Let me finish that sentence.

Adam Wern: Yeah, you say it all the time and you don’t want to do mood boarding. You don’t want to do visual prototypes or show us the ideas.

Frode Hegland: You don’t want to finish the sentence.

Adam Wern: Yeah, but you say it over and over again.

Frode Hegland: My main communication is writing, but if we had agreed on a certain kind of demo to work towards, then I could start doing that. Right. But right now all you guys are doing is a mural, which is important. But I have to also like you have to be honest with the rest of my work. Visual meta is really important to me. Documents are important to me. So that doesn’t fit the mural mold. So when I write things and I try to explain what happens, you know, we’re.

Peter Wasilko: All.

Frode Hegland: You know, different kinds of literacies.

Peter Wasilko: But.

Frode Hegland: You know, you all have amazing imagination. So why do I have to make movies for you to to comment back? Right. But if you had agreed today that one of the things we can do to help us understand what a pitch might be, we may not even share it with anyone would be to take a document into VR and then do this, that and the other with it. If we had agreed on it, this, that and the other, then we can really start experimenting. But as it is now. You know you are sending mural to me, I am sending text to you and there isn’t a dialogue. If we had an agreement on where to go, there could be a dialogue and we could do it more easily.

Brandel Zachernuk: What I’m listening to you. I don’t really read is the thing. I just don’t. Sorry. Okay. So I’m listening to you and I’m definitely taking taking feedback and interested in where this goes from there. I mean, there may be a somewhat of a bitter irony in that I don’t I don’t really like writing very much. And so we’re trying to work on the future of text is perhaps sort of just putting off the necessary work of actually doing some damn writing. But no, I like my involvement in this community is an interest in approaches and things. And to that end, like discussing what goes on in and what what should happen with these experiments is really useful. Yeah, I think what Adam was saying, I don’t know what the boring stuff is that, that other people can help with that you would need other to be able to kind of pay other people for because when you do small self-contained prototypes, the amount of the boring work is the stitching. The boring work is the glue. And I don’t I don’t know that. Yeah, I don’t I don’t see the.

Frode Hegland: The thing we have to do an integrated big demo. I’m not saying that but like. It looks like Adam is staying here in the texture. You know, sharing code and ideas and so on. You know, I do think this work is very important, but to have to scrape Twitter. To put it into the journal. I can do it to an extent, but why can’t you guys? I’m not saying you have to write an academic perfectly formed article, but just send me a word document.

Adam Wern: What I feel is that why do I have to scrape your long, unedited text pieces for short summaries? So why don’t you do mood boarding? That is the hard work and boring work to do. The mood 100 pictures of what could be done, what you like in them. If you design a house, you do that and we are is very visual and I think it’s hard to explain things in words. Sometimes it works fine as a metaphor and but for many things it doesn’t.

Frode Hegland: It’s not a pitch. Document has two pages of illustrations.

Adam Wern: Yeah, but then I want more maybe or more edited because I get text, long text from you every second day and I mean like three and four pages and I really need to it’s hard to sift through it and find the valuable pieces if, if there.

Peter Wasilko: Were like.

Adam Wern: Summaries one, pagers, maybe.

Frode Hegland: And closing and closing for me, then, because I really cannot afford a heart attack. Couldn’t it be reasonable that the community tries to help making such documents easier to read? Couldn’t that be one thing we could work on? Why should the onus? I do try to condense. I do try to have summaries. I do try to have introductions. I do have screenshots on these things. But you all accept that you don’t want to read the documents. Fair enough.

Peter Wasilko: Maybe what? Maybe what is needed is the invention of something like the invention of storyboarding for movies. Originally, they were just scripted, and then there was invention of storyboarding. So it would be helpful for me at least to have something like storyboarding for the lost document, for a PR demo to begin with, to be able to make one. But that’s only me. I realize that’s only me.

Frode Hegland: I don’t know. The last document I wrote was very loosely on purpose because I was asking questions for the community. It was like, What are the elements we feel? You know, I didn’t write that much prose, you know, and I didn’t get any feedback on someone taking a.

Peter Wasilko: Bit saying, you know, you’re not addressing the point that I’m making. That’s all right. And maybe I’m not addressing the point that you’re making. That’s all right. I guess, too. I’m just I just had the idea that maybe there’s some kind of of a of some of an invention, a creation that this group could make or or maybe other maybe other people already have invented a way of doing this. And we don’t know about it.

Frode Hegland: Information compression is something that I forget talked about. And one of the recent presentations, which I think reflects what you’re talking about, a way to communicate more.

Peter Wasilko: It’s not. It’s not if you if you if you reduce it to information compression. It’s not what I’m talking about. Okay. All right.

Frode Hegland: So if I was to be able to have a positive contribution to this community, what you guys want to see is storyboards of ideas of how to do things.

Peter Wasilko: Is that. No.

Brandel Zachernuk: Hold on. If you’re concerned that the only way to be a positive contributor to the community is by creating a pitch, then that is absolutely misguided because simply by convening and being able to listen and talk, that is as much as anyone has ever done. For most of my work. And as to your point, much harder than most people recognize and realize to be able to comment on it, if that makes you feel minimized in some way, because all you’re doing is talking and looking and saying, wow, this is interesting. Can it do that? I’m sorry. Because that’s that’s actually a lot more than just about everybody, including at Apple and Meta I’ve ever spoken to, have the ability to be able to kind of do so if you’re concerned about your your role in this. I do agree that if you were to invest in doing some drawing overlays over some some photos from your perspective or using Blender or Cinema 4D, that would be very beneficial. But you don’t need to write to be useful simply being a being able to be sort of an anchor for a community, being able to comment on those things, provide suggestions and opportunities is incredibly valuable to the point of a pitch.

Brandel Zachernuk: Hold on just a second. So to the point of a pitch, again, as it has perhaps sounded denigrating and self-deprecating in the past, being out of academia, not being from a position where I have needed to do a lot of complex writing, I was not being denigrating when I said, I don’t know the function of a journal, I don’t know those things. But that also means I don’t really understand the function or the goal of a pitch because I don’t need anything from anyone to continue doing this other than a continued audience and forum for discussion. And I agree that it would be good to get a wider audience, but I’m apprehensive about trying to seek one without having greater clarity about the function of the work and being able to get that thing nailed down. And so to the to the end of trying to get a pitch to convince Vint within a month. That’s why that’s why I was decided to sort of come out with clarity and explicitness that.

Frode Hegland: We can, we can think, we can do it, we can drop the pitch. That’s fine. But the thing is, I really think real data matters, right? I really think so. And okay, so I am not a very good writer.

Peter Wasilko: Fair enough.

Frode Hegland: And I do sometimes do thoughts, conscious, whatever you want to call it. But like Mark Andreessen pointed out, that last pitch thing I wrote looked too much like it was about author. It was completely right. I had to delete that whole section because I was just writing from my perspective. But the thing is. We all think differently. You are here 2 hours a week, twice often, and you expect to be spoken, shown and listened to write. If I write something and if it’s too long and no one says that until we get into this discussion, that’s not very helpful for me. But if someone says, you know, like Mark said, and he didn’t say it in a nice way, so I got quite upset, but at least he read the darn thing and he said, This is rubbish. He didn’t use those bad words, but he did point out some real flaws and what I had written.

Peter Wasilko: Right.

Frode Hegland: But when I’m talking about a pitch, forget the word pitch then. But I’m talking about moving about an image on a mural is great as a test thing as you’ve done. But I really I personally want to have my documents and VR, at least aspects of them, so I can interact with them. Otherwise I’m playing with literally toys.

Mark Anderson: Right? Getting sent around in circles because I think the disconnect is I’m not sure anyone knows what your document is. The thing is, I don’t see a difference between your document and a document. What I want to talk about when I talk a.

Frode Hegland: Lot, when I talk about a document, I mean what is traditionally called a file, a document. I’m not talking about a JPEG.

Mark Anderson: Right. So how does that.

Frode Hegland: I’m explaining, Mark?

Mark Anderson: Okay. Go ahead.

Frode Hegland: I for me, at some point in my life, I want to be an author or equivalent write stuff and images, add metadata, put on my goggles and see it in a big space. That’s what I mean by documents.

Mark Anderson: That’s fine. Well, we can take the we can take the mural, stick it in a liquid document, and we can do all of that. So I have been saying.

Frode Hegland: That for a very long time, Mark. I know that and I agree with that. But my frustration here is that, okay, forget the pitch. I’m perfectly fine, entirely dropping, doing anything at the end of the month. The reservations, Randall said, are completely valid. The experimentation Adam wants to do are completely valid. The background and library Fabian has is completely valid, and I’m not going to go through every single point that’s completely valid. Fine. Right. But for people like you and me to be part of this, we’re not just going to do Photoshop mockups, right? Some of the stuff we will get will be text, right? And I would really, really like if these amazing brains would allow some of this. Stuff to go in and out. I mean, Brandel, you’ve already done more for my work in VR than anyone in the world, so I’m very grateful for that. Right. And Fabien, you actually have meeting rooms for us to walk around in VR. That is very real and useful, right? So I am of artistic nature. That’s my background. Maybe I’m a bit more loud than some of you while I’m definitely am. Right. Maybe we need. I need to lift you a bit to scream louder, and maybe you need to lower me down to more cautious level. Right. But I really think that there is a potential that along with the isolated experiments, which we must do. We could also do something where we can start arguing. And we are you know, we write what I call a document which could be almost anything, put around everything, figure out how to deal with that. Right.

Peter Wasilko: Well, there are ways to argue in in structured ways. And I will say that a mural is just a bunch of text arranged in in spatial form at a different spatial form. Aided by some visual elements. That’s all it is. The mural is all just all text.

Frode Hegland: But the problem I have with only doing a mural is that.

Peter Wasilko: I don’t say, Oh, and I didn’t say only. And you know.

Frode Hegland: Yes, I.

Peter Wasilko: Do that often.

Frode Hegland: No, but Bob, I have said at least once every 30 minutes a mural is important. It is. First of all, it is a powerful demonstration of VR in and of itself is a useful thing. And in everything that I’ve written lately, I murals are one of the key things that should be in there. There’s no question about that. I don’t disagree with that at all. But for some reason, there seems to be a reticence in the.

Peter Wasilko: Group.

Frode Hegland: That we should also deal with documents that have things like murals in them.

Peter Wasilko: I don’t have that reticence. I think that I’ve gotten I’ve done that sort of document, you know, circulated that to the whole group to do with a different area of sustainability. I’ll tell you, the.

Brandel Zachernuk: Thing that’s stopping me at the moment is that I need to get around to. So the next the next thing that I have related to this that I want to play with is putting speech in space that’s actually already out, but then being able to get the corresponding text. One of the issues with that is that the Oculus browser doesn’t it doesn’t give you the ability to do the speech recognition. So I’ll use my AirPods and connect those through my Mac so that I’m sending those things over a website. And at that point then I’ll have the ability to have because because that sort of inherently multi device will have the ability to to have that be intrinsically multiplayer as well provided I get the IDs right and that’s going to be in my next things is thinking about what that means. We can do with the presentation of information, potentially the recording and playback of those pieces of information in situ like the text editor. And and that’s, I think really interesting, something that I haven’t played much with which I’ve been really interested in in an author. And what Phil Gooch presented recently is the possibility of actually hooking into rich text sources, the only issue being being able to get enough clarity and certainty of what those particular references and resources are. So I’m really excited by that and being able to actually create and construct freeform sort of documents of words and yeah, like once, once that sort of voice component. Because right now of course I can, I can put an utterance here, but all I have is the ability to playback that sound and that sound and that sound, and they don’t have that sort of textual counterpoints. But, but once those things come in then yeah, there’s a lot of really interesting opportunities.

Frode Hegland: So Brandel that is really, really cool and really worthwhile. But I have to ask the question of what is the point of these meetings because. It is nice to see demos of things in here, right. But a lot of our discussion is really what should we really be doing? That’s been a recurring theme over the last three months. So if.

Peter Wasilko: We.

Frode Hegland: Aren’t trying to at least partly augment our own dialogue. Like, I would love to see the Journal in a VR space.

Peter Wasilko: But.

Frode Hegland: When that happens, we come down to question of what is we are really for what is the purpose we’re trying to do? All those existential questions come up. And then I have to wonder, why don’t you ask those existential questions about the things you happen to be demoing about? Probably the answer is because it’s hard, right? But it’s easy to do those things. So when it comes to the journal itself, yes, you don’t have to read my articles. It would be nice if you at least skim the headings. I do try to do what Bob said and highlight and actually bold the bits that I want to communicate. But please at least try to give us Mark and me something coherent at some kind of. Because as I said, scraping Twitter is quite a lot of work. But I’m happy to give you an audience here. Brandel really happy, right? Because what you impart is amazing. But like Adam, you know, we had a great chat yesterday, but so he is now telling me he doesn’t want to read my lengthy writings, but he actually does watch the entire videos when he has missed out on the group meetings. So we do have different levels of how we want to deal with information. So why can’t we take our own record like we talked about in the beginning, including the transcripts? And, you know, Mark and I transcribe every single meeting. It’s all in the website. Why can’t we work on some of that stuff to build our own thing? And that’s what I’m talking about.

Brandel Zachernuk: So I think it’s I think it’s a great resource to start from. So, you know, one, one, one aspect of the of the why why can’t we read your stuff is one thing that perhaps you could consider doing is presenting those documents in this context, actually talking through what you believe the document does, because otherwise we have fairly few handles for looking at them just as a suggestion because I make things, but I also try to present those things. And so a presentation of a document is still, is still a valuable thing. But yeah, no, I think that it’s important to be able to subject interaction mechanisms and techniques to a larger corpus, and that’s an awesome URL.

Frode Hegland: The thing that I mentioned early that was really annoying because it was clever, you know, like so the thing is, if we could work together on solving the problem of my stuff being boring to read, that would be a real contribution.

Peter Wasilko: Because.

Frode Hegland: Is I mean, I’ve been working on the future of text for over a decade now and that is the key problem. Unless you’re reading a wonderfully written book by an author, normally fiction, it’s boring.

Brandel Zachernuk: Right? Well, so one issue there is not that it’s boring, but it’s actually not for us. What you’re writing is not for us because you’re regurgitating rehashing a number of points which do require sort of iteration in order to hone, but therefore for an audience which is much coming to a much colder than us. And so to that end, it’s not a conversation with us. It’s a demo of a presentation to somebody else. And I take the point that it’s a valuable thing, but but it means that there is a constant reiteration of these points, which it doesn’t have relevance for the for the stuff that we need to have. And so to that end, I’m not reintroducing concepts completely fresh time and time again. I don’t go into word reality and sort of pretend that ta ta ta to every presentation that I make. And so, so thinking about your audience and what it is you need to tell each of those and what, what can actually slip because you have an expectation of a common sort of frame of reference is a valuable piece of it. But I really do think that presenting those things within the confines of these meetings is a useful thing because yeah, I do other things and, and I try to get to these, but I have other calls on my time. But devoting this time to that and presenting those documents, I think would probably help.

Mark Anderson: Fabian Yeah, two quick perspective, my wiki, I put stuff in it and sometimes other people read it, sometimes I read it. Most of the time it’s just there as storage or memory, meaning that 99.99% of the time is useless, but the little bit where it is useful, then it’s actually extremely precious. And this is how I see most of the archiving, especially when there is. Let’s debrief at the beginning of the meeting that summarize what has happened. So to me that that’s also a different way on how I express myself online and how I put text. And I assume some of the archiving of those sessions were a bit like this, including the Journal. That being said, I believe if there is a reading requirement in order to make a decision for a meeting, that’s also fine. But otherwise, if it’s not an actual requirement because we don’t have a deadline to announce it, that’s also okay. That’s just how I sit.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. Going a bit back to Brandel staying. I know you’re trying to be positive, but first of all, you do actually repeat quite a lot because when you go back to the folding and the mural, that’s a repeat and it’s a good repeat right when I repeat and what I’m writing. Yes, some of it is maybe a little bit too much, just consciousness flow. But because I get zero feedback, I don’t actually know what you agree with or think is repetitive, right? And the whole point of a document is not to present it. That’s a presentation. That is something else. We can I can we can do that. And I’m hoping Brandel, by the way, that you will do your guest presentation soon. I can’t remember the date.

Peter Wasilko: You have for it, right?

Frode Hegland: I haven’t. So presentations are good, but the background of this is the future of text. So I don’t understand why we can’t work on text. Like sometimes you just have to write a lot of stuff.

Peter Wasilko: Because because text has a lot of different meanings. That’s why it is. That is why one of the reasons it’s very difficult.

Frode Hegland: I’m talking primarily. I’m talking.

Peter Wasilko: Primarily. It has a set of meanings for you that are different from me. Yeah, I am talking.

Frode Hegland: I’m talking specifically about typographic symbolic texts like that’s one might find in the book. That is the primary definition of texts in the future of text community. Right. And of course we go in different directions. So I mean, Adam, I would like it if your frustration of reading my stuff was expressed in solutions for how to do it, how to get through it. Yeah, sorry if I been still thinking about what you said. See you later. You know, if it was this is a crap document, maybe it would be easier if I could collapse the headings, or maybe if the glossary is supposed to be a way for us to communicate more succinctly. These are issues that I’m trying to address, but they aren’t really. Communicate it in here. You know, I’ve done presentations on the glossary thing and. Yeah. Sorry, Brandel. I see what you’re writing, so.

Peter Wasilko: I don’t know.

Mark Anderson: Yeah, I need to bang out soon.

Peter Wasilko: Yeah, me too.

Brandel Zachernuk: So. Yeah, I, I I’m sorry that you’re so frustrated. I’m not. I think what we’re doing is really interesting, and I think that it adds up to a really wonderful point. My, my challenge from being involved in marketing and advertising is that I think that creating media that you’re not responsible for presenting to somebody directly is vastly harder, like you said, with with Gooch, like you just showed him. And he was like, okay, I get it. So that’s that’s the other aspect of it is that if you actually are there with somebody. So one of the things that I’m doing is just arming myself with as much stuff as possible to be able to talk to people about it. So yeah, but I’m sorry, I’ve got to say that and.

Peter Wasilko: Please don’t.

Brandel Zachernuk: Feel like this minimizes your role or anything like that. It’s actually not just that I don’t like reading is that I’m not good at it and I don’t get much out of it when I do. I don’t understand it very well. So yeah, the point is that like the ability for people to communicate to each other orally once they have those kinds of things is valuable as well. So writing it might be useful. And then talking about what you’ve written.

Frode Hegland: I do have you. I will time your last 60 seconds. I’m trying to help us communicate with less writing. I don’t think speech is necessarily a good substitute, but if we can write in ways that are more succinct, better linked, basically hyper textually, we can read at different levels, but we have to develop that together, right? I don’t like to read either.

Peter Wasilko: I like to read.

Frode Hegland: Well, there’s different kinds of reading, obviously. Adam.

Mark Anderson: Okay.

Peter Wasilko: I’ve got to go. I’m going to have a look.

Frode Hegland: All right. Thanks, everybody. See you all. Except for you, Adam. That last comment there. Not good enough to post. That’s absolute rubbish. If you have a perspective, it’s good enough.

Adam Wern: Yeah, but I don’t like it because you see. See so many people on your documents and send so many versions. So often I feel that I don’t want to post comments to a VIN or to Bob or to you there unless it’s really.

Frode Hegland: Well, that’s fine. I directly and say not for publication yet and then.

Adam Wern: I do that once in a while. But they also did it. I agree with Mark in the hyperbolic things, for example, and I don’t know how to express that. In a nice way that isn’t taking isn’t taking us on offense. But you and I feel that you’re are a bit touched by those comments or. And then I, then I don’t want to say it because I don’t want to be and I don’t know how to express that. When it says when you use Sue, do you call super lit superlatives?

Frode Hegland: But why do you why do you feel a need to comment on that? I mean, I would never say to you or one of the other more technically capable guy saying this is too technical, you know, why would I kill you?

Adam Wern: Do that to you. Do that to Peter. But okay, but.

Frode Hegland: I do it to Peter when it’s out of scope. When he talks about EMBA and programming languages that none of us use, that has nothing to do with VR and very little to do with text. Yes, I do. I feel bad for that. But I am also trying to to find a scope for things.

Peter Wasilko: So.

Adam Wern: But the problem here for me is that I can’t express myself that it is both honest and very constructive, or not at least hurtful. And then I keep quiet and I think think others do that as well. And but I at least I speak for myself when I can’t and when I think in ideas not the right way, like this pitch thing. I don’t know how to respond here in a constructive way. And so I’m quiet instead because I don’t know how to how to end it today, even after this discussion with everyone. The points are not really getting through here. I feel I feel that you feel that we don’t understand you when you don’t understand us really, in a way.

Frode Hegland: Well, I have first of all, I have dropped, as I said, the idea of doing a pitch.

Adam Wern: No, no, no. Maybe. Yeah, but. But not. Yeah.

Frode Hegland: I did say it earlier as well. Okay. Brandon’s points are valid about doing a pitch. I get it. Let’s drop that. But I do feel that we should have. I don’t know what the word is. A demo, a pitch, a project, let’s call it a project for some way of dealing with our own data. That is text and document oriented. I have to be honest with myself. Visual media is important. I can’t do completely separate things. I need to find a way to combine it, same as everyone else does. And if we have a Venn diagram with an overview, maybe it’s something we should actually draw. That would be good, but we haven’t actually worked in this space on collaboration systems. I’ve spent years developing.

Peter Wasilko: Author.

Frode Hegland: Right. It is my contribution to the group that liquid format is open, visual is open. Nobody actually writes documents back to me using author. It’s a little bit frustrating, but I’m not going to push that too hard. So when I then say, Can we have a VR.

Peter Wasilko: Workflow where.

Frode Hegland: You put up an argument, I put up a counterargument maybe, and they connect, that might be useful. But then currently all I see is mural. Mural is great, but it shouldn’t be all. Right. Because I have no authoring tools for a mural. Mural doesn’t fit my workflow, you know, it is something to put in the journal. It’s something to show people it’s fantastic work, especially your physics based stuff, you know, it is. No, it is literally mind bending.

Adam Wern: Yeah, it’s interesting. But the thing here is that I don’t it’s very hard to start with, let’s say author, you have that and you have developed that. But it doesn’t really it’s not a natural fit for VR. It will be a very forced fit. I think it’s like absolutely not. Yeah, for me it is. It’s a mako with applications and memory. There are many things and I use that but but it’s a very niche thing. So you say that it’s for students.

Frode Hegland: No, but hang on, Adam. First of all, I’m not saying people have to use author, but what author does do is deals with metadata very well. Right. So when a document is published from author, you can computationally know all the references. So that is something that can really work in VR. Right. You also know who authored the document which most documents don’t even know. And finally, the glossary which I really wanted more dialogue on, is something that can be spread out in space. Right. It is born for VR. It’s constrained the way it is now, and I would much rather have someone do something similar and kind of fight me, so to speak, for the best way of doing it. I’m not trying to impose my commercial software author upon the group. Not at.

Peter Wasilko: All.

Frode Hegland: But in the same way that you can build.

Adam Wern: So should we stop the recording or do you cut this off? Often we can.

Frode Hegland: Either way, it doesn’t really. It doesn’t really matter. But it’s.

Peter Wasilko: Just.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. I mean, to me, I don’t know. I’m really, really frustrated and it’s quite clear that people have very specific positions today was very useful to get that out of Brandel position.

Adam Wern: Yeah. And to me, his position was kind of obvious.

Frode Hegland: Oh, yeah.

Adam Wern: And same with Fabian Sander. And so. So in a way, I feel that your position is a bit more unrealistic in that people are working full time, doing demos that are interesting and stimulating, have a good discussion of them, should combine them, which is very hard work, much harder than than doing demos. It’s ten times as much work in combining to two things or three things.

Frode Hegland: I understand that. I’m not saying they necessarily have to be combined, but it is very frustrating to me. For instance, Rendell’s taking the glossaries and the map from author document into VR. It’s fantastic, but I can’t actually ask him to make changes. That is very, very frustrating. You understand that, obviously, right?

Adam Wern: I can feel it. But but still, it’s not that useful. It has been done before. It’s mostly a to this thing in 3D. And even I do I have done many such prototypes for a while. We speak, I haven’t shown them. But while we and it’s not really useful until you do something more with them, until it’s taking taking the next step. And that is a hard work. And you know, well, all the work with knowledge graph that people are showing, but it’s not really useful. And so yeah, so I understand the reluctance of doing more to.

Frode Hegland: It, but that’s the key point. We don’t seem to have a discussion as to what is useful. All we have is the neuro.

Adam Wern: Yeah, but I think you could lead them. But now you overwhelm us with so much process. Respond to this, respond to this and respond to this. We can’t really have that discussion. And that is frustrating you.

Frode Hegland: You don’t necessarily have to read that. I well, obviously.

Adam Wern: I read most of your things and at least I skim everything. So.

Peter Wasilko: Yeah, but, but Adam.

Frode Hegland: No one actually reads in response to the articles in the journal either. So it’s not just about what I send write.

Adam Wern: Nope. But I’ve been very.

Peter Wasilko: Oh.

Adam Wern: I’ve been very honest with that. I don’t think that your journal is very useful more as a maybe if you want to dig for something specific in the future. But as a day to day thing, I don’t think it’s useful, useful enough. It’s just a big copy paste of everything and it’s not so much of a curation. And if it’s not curating, all the work is on the reader to actually find things.

Frode Hegland: Adam It is curated. First of all, every single meeting is transcribed.

Adam Wern: Yeah, but that’s not the curation in itself.

Peter Wasilko: Of course it’s not work. No, no, that’s not. That’s your saying.

Frode Hegland: But Adam, the ones in the journal are not every single meeting, it’s only the guest hosts. They are edited. It’s quite a lot of editing for people to remove things like so and then. So I did this and so I did that. And the current issue I’ve gone through bolding important bits in the text. So there is curation as far as the articles are concerned, you know, if people want to contribute, it goes in there when you the idea is trying to make it easier for you to decide what to read in the in the in the journal. Please don’t say that. Everything just goes in there. I don’t post everything you say on Twitter in there, do I.

Adam Wern: No, but okay. But I think you could understand that point without exaggerating. So when I say everything that I don’t think, I don’t mean every email thread and every but a lot of things goes a lot of things goes in there. And even if there are bolded under spell corrected and all syndromes are removed, that is not really a refined thing anyway, because lots of our discussions, only a few things are really useful. So requiring people to scan through it to find the goal, even their goals are hard work for the reader.

Frode Hegland: And Adam, you don’t have to read the transcripts of the presentations. You’ve already seen them, right? That’s for the long future. I agree with you. But we do have a new section on resources where things that people really highlight are in there that could hopefully be useful. But if we just have a website, you saw what happened with the the circle thing. It wasn’t used. It cost me $80 a month. Now I’ve reduced it. And you got very annoyed, understandably.

Adam Wern: Annoyed that you didn’t say anything beforehand so I could copy the contents and so on.

Frode Hegland: I did. It must have been spoken. I did. I’m sorry that it wasn’t clearly said. That is my responsibility.

Adam Wern: And I actually wrote things there. You and me and someone else wrote a few things.

Frode Hegland: You know, it’s still oh, there’s only a few sections that are gone, you know.

Adam Wern: But I happened to be the section where I posted the most. But you and me and Stephane was the one I was writing there, discussing things, I think. But that is not it’s not a big thing that. But to me the journalist not really because. It’s not. If I can find some value of it, it’s. Is it more important than the. Rewatching a recording or watching a call or something else? Reading a good book. And it’s not. That’s the reality of it. It’s not.

Frode Hegland: No, no, that’s fine. But then I have to look at what we’re supposed to do as a community. Because if obviously by writing not just you, but everyone is just not up to scratch, so people aren’t going to read and reply. And the time we take, of course, is these 2 hours times two a week. But if that time is going to be look what I did at and we are today and in many cases we’re not shared links so we can actually experience it. In VR we just see videos and that’s kind of lazy curating from your perspective, right? You could present it in different ways, so why should I just show?

Adam Wern: That is like saying you should have written a published article and instead of writing, sending us your first draft, it’s really, it’s, it’s really, really hard to do kind of a demo. It takes ten times as much time and you could also take ten times as much time. We’re doing a very short thing because that takes ten times more time and feedback and so on, and we don’t have that time.

Peter Wasilko: So I rather post screenshots.

Frode Hegland: I’m not going to be sharing any writing that’s not going to be a problem. Right. But if this community, based on the technologically advanced people such as yourself, is purely you guys telling us, look what I did and it doesn’t have another link. So we can look at it on a base level like you do. You might as well just. Now that should be part of it. But there isn’t any collective effort to produce anything. The Journal has no value. The recordings. Very few people will watch. We don’t want to build something together. So it basically becomes, Look what I did. Oh. Which is what I’ve been doing, too. And writing, which wasn’t interesting. But you’re doing it with.

Mark Anderson: With tweets.

Adam Wern: Yeah. And I do it in a closed group where. Where I at least feel that. Maybe. Brandel Ofeibea And sometimes you also delay like, like some of those things. And to have a discussion on that, that in a small group that is that is interesting, but not all the members are interested in even in that group. So I try to keep it smaller and I also have side discussions with Alan and so on. That is not maybe interesting for you or so. But I’m not really sure how I should contribute then because I can’t really do a product. It’s hard to do products, hard to do even to to put on the handrails of a demo that you can’t move in this direction, then it will explode. That takes ten times as much time as well. Well, the point is not that interesting anyway.

Mark Anderson: So.

Frode Hegland: I know. I understand that. I understand that. Yeah. I mean, it does look to me like the project has run its course and it probably will be useful for you at Brandel and Fabian to continue specific VR meetings.

Peter Wasilko: But yeah.

Frode Hegland: You know, we you know, we had this we go into details of how to fold the thing. And that is very important. But we try to think really wide when the whole dreaming thing there was zero zero uptake. And when I write something, what I hear from you and Mark is it’s just advertising, marketing, hyperbole. You can’t relate to it. You know.

Adam Wern: We are not not just that is an exaggeration, but there is a substantial amount of hype hyperbole.

Frode Hegland: But that doesn’t.

Adam Wern: Detract from the good things in that document. Like you have a very nice use of stories, how you come in like a descriptive story that is very nice. And I think that’s rich for me to read the user story. You come in, you do that, you unpack your own thing, and that’s a living thing that really speaks to me, but also the other parts.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, no, hang on. Two things. First of all.

Peter Wasilko: You.

Frode Hegland: Could then reply to that. And secondly, when you show something I’m not going to say I don’t like the grey in the background. You know, you don’t like my prose in the beginning, setting things up. Skip it.

Adam Wern: I would like to a few more things. I agree, and that is what I like about Alan because he is not really holding back when I post something out. This is just a fake or JS thing we need to go past. I find that a bit refreshing because he’s honest, but he also appreciates the detail but is honest about the the uselessness of it and not pretending. Oh, this is wonderful. I don’t I don’t want to hear that. It’s wonderful or brilliant or so on. I want to hear what things you like and what things you read.

Frode Hegland: But why can’t you do me the honor of then you said some of the things in my dreaming document that you thought were useful. Why can’t you say so?

Adam Wern: I feel that it takes forever to write. It takes me an hour or two to write many of these things.

Frode Hegland: Just copy a sentence and say, I like this.

Adam Wern: I could do that. But I hope you know that yourself that this is good.

Peter Wasilko: No.

Adam Wern: You must have something in your composite. I like this.

Frode Hegland: No, Adam, in all honesty, for the last two and a half hours. I have been told that by writing a shit.

Adam Wern: Part of your writing is exaggerated. That’s not.

Frode Hegland: No, no, no, no. It’s. It’s. It’s too.

Peter Wasilko: Long.

Adam Wern: And that was too much.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, that’s too repetitive. It’s too hyperbole. Again and again. And again. At no point that anyone say that there’s anything valuable in there. So why in the world would I think that something is valuable if you think something is valuable to say. This idea I liked. Can we discuss it? Has real purpose. You know, if something is, you know, it’s like.

Adam Wern: But I think the setting where you said you said that or got those comments was not what you think about my writing it over. Well, that was not the question. The question was why? Why didn’t you read my oral? Why didn’t you like my texts? And then then we answered that part, but we didn’t.

Frode Hegland: Fair enough. But you’re making. You’re saying that you like some of it, and I should know that some of it’s good. At same as when you show a demo of something. If we don’t say, that’s interesting, how in the world would you know that? We also think it’s good?

Adam Wern: I don’t. So then I have to trust my own instincts mostly. And but people usually tell me if it’s wrong or sometimes it’s bad or good. But I really hate Oh, this is wonderful. This is awesome. And that next and then that’s just as you.

Frode Hegland: We’re not we’re not talking about that we’re talking about if there was something genuine in my dreaming document that you thought was interesting or positive in some way. If that’s. If you just have that thought and you move on. I don’t know that. Nope.

Adam Wern: I would hope that we could have a discussion of that and just in the call. But for the last four, the last week for that, I got I’ve gotten like six documents from you.

Frode Hegland: Yes.

Peter Wasilko: And I mean.

Frode Hegland: Anything about.

Adam Wern: The revisions. Yeah. So it’s different documents, different revisions, very many documents. So we can’t even stick to one document and say what’s good because I’ve got eight others.

Frode Hegland: And yes, over the last week or two, I have been stressing about doing a pitch. So there have been specific, but usually it isn’t that level of frequency, is it?

Adam Wern: We have the Egyptian things. We have the many visual meta things. It has been about the same. Not in Christmas, maybe. Okay, but.

Frode Hegland: But if there is something useful in the journal as an article there or elsewhere, don’t you think it will be useful to say through email or an article or on Twitter or in the conversation saying this thing, what you wrote, can we discuss it? What is the hesitancy to note down a few positive things? What I want to have and the reason this community is probably not going to continue, I want to have a positively reinforcing community. I’m not saying we should all say we all look fantastic every day. Look at those new glasses you’re wearing. But I am talking about yes, of course, calling out nonsense in a polite way, but also when someone has a new innovation to positively say that. And then maybe discuss how it can go further. But you are currently representing the whole.

Peter Wasilko: Group.

Frode Hegland: Because it’s.

Adam Wern: Just unfair, because I’m only one and I have my perspective that may not at all match. Match the others.

Frode Hegland: No, no, but it’s not fair. But. But, Adam, seriously, can you at the top of your head think of something from one of the documents I’ve written in the last three months that you thought was cool, interesting, useful or something?

Adam Wern: Yep. Egyptian mural. How you throw pyramids up on from the timeline to the timeline. Super cool. Immediately. It is a visual that is that stuck with me from that document.

Frode Hegland: Okay, great. Thank you. So on that, a couple of things. First of all, it is nice for me to know that. Secondly, you said it is visual, it’s written, but it is visual in your head.

Adam Wern: But it creates a visual in my head. It’s alive and becomes a visual or something.

Frode Hegland: Yes, it is something that I didn’t feel the need to mock up in Photoshop because I expected that to happen in your head. And it did. Right. But but the one that I was more excited about, in addition to that, was being able to walk in to a timeline and being in that time.

Peter Wasilko: Yep.

Adam Wern: That thought. So when you say it, that also stuck with me then. But or not.

Frode Hegland: But why in the world that nobody in the community bring that up in a session or write something and saying, can we discuss this further? That is a real issue, right?

Adam Wern: Because you hide those gems. In the rest.

Frode Hegland: But when you actually find them.

Adam Wern: Forget if they find it. I if I read the document I found, they’re throwing the pyramid. I found that very stimulating. Yeah.

Frode Hegland: So why can you. I’m talking about you specifically, but what is it that stops you for saying in the next call? Is like that document you just wrote was way too long. However, this, this and this point was really interesting. Can we discuss it? What stops you from saying that?

Adam Wern: I don’t remember it at that point. When we start a call and we talk about everything, we talk of ordinary life for Peter talks about the OR it is usually start it doesn’t really start out that way.

Frode Hegland: What this is where we connect because if we can find a way to work where it is supported, that you can do that maybe through selecting that text and highlighting it maybe through a magical share button or and also to keep there. Peter, whom I respect in so many ways, from talking about him behind going into these things, if we can if we can figure out a way to do that, we have a strong community because then it’ll be easier for me to write less. And for us to discuss more. So how do we do that then? Maybe that should be the topic for next fall if we’re going to.

Adam Wern: Have another call. Yeah. And it ties back to what you and I talked about yesterday to to pull things out and put in in some sort of basis can be 2D, 3D or even one dimensional, a text document like a shared text document. But I think 3D is or at least 2D, a wall of some sort is needed to pull out the good stuff from.

Peter Wasilko: When you read.

Frode Hegland: My PDFs. When I send you a PDF to you read it and reader or another PDF reader.

Adam Wern: Which half of the time is directly into my Gmail client. So the worst possible experience of them all. So I just preview and because it’s instant, I don’t use I don’t download it the other time I just, just use a default preview because that.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, that’s obviously awful, everything you just said. But that is something we can work on together to improve. Even if it’s a web based reader or whatever, a system whereby you don’t have to read all my crud, I write less crud. You find something good and there is a mechanism for you.

Adam Wern: To highlight that, or a small margin comment that you could work on directly, because it’s a quite, quite hard thing to start over from a claim document and say that this passage and this passage repetitive, this wording is a bit over, over the top and this is great. This should be at the top in the whole document.

Peter Wasilko: Painter Well, yeah.

Frode Hegland: I mean, that’s kind of like copy editing. That’s something that you should not have to do. I should do that properly.

Peter Wasilko: Right?

Adam Wern: But the reality is that we don’t. We need second and third ISO.

Peter Wasilko: Yeah, no.

Frode Hegland: I know. But if I, if I had faith that you would read my stuff and revert comments, I would be able to write shorter. And if.

Peter Wasilko: You.

Frode Hegland: Singular and plural you use reader, you would be able to interact with the documents in a much richer way. So my dream is to be able to provide you with the documents in a way that you don’t have to download and all of that nonsense. I think that is a real problem with the Dropbox issue, but I provide you with a live journal, so to speak, in.

Peter Wasilko: Pdf.

Frode Hegland: That you can read and all these ways and you can do. A little bit of this is rubbish style wise, but also already know as just to remind you if you select text and copy it from author excuse me reader and paste it and author it knows where it came from. You pasted as a citation, right? That is supposed to help you exactly this point.

Adam Wern: Yeah. So if I send that author document back or a PDF of it back, will you be able to pinpoint that by any other means than a find like select and find or. At the moment? I mean. Or is that possible?

Frode Hegland: I have to I have to do a better find.

Adam Wern: But I think that’s fine enough.

Frode Hegland: No, no, no. But the issue is that I think this community is absolutely wonderful, but we’re currently in a really bad position because the dialogue right now isn’t good. Right. So I’m really, really hoping that we can address that by fixing this for ourselves. So one of the absolute key things I must try to find money to develop is paragraph or sentence level address ability to do what you need. It is really important for that reason. So to actually solve our own currently really crappy communication is I think, a really important thing to work on. Other people can benefit from that too.

Adam Wern: But what I think people do is that either they use word and use the inbuilt function commenting functions that are not nice looking, but they get the job done or they paste it into a Google Docs thing and do inline comments and they solve it. Not the tools are not pleasurable, they are, but they get the job done and done. And I think that is the way. Many people work.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, it is the way many people work. But my thinking is that. Other than telling me how to change the structure of a document because that absolutely Google Docs is much better for that to work together. No question. But let’s say that I managed to produce a document that is coherent. It’s not too much waffle, no spelling mistakes. And I give that to you by the journal. What you should be able to do. Copy, text, start a new piece and say I think so and so, blah blah blah. Around that, when you publish it back into our universe, these documents are automatically connected because of that citation. And that is where we can start building a rich and useful dialogue.

Mark Anderson: Where you.

Frode Hegland: Feel maybe it’s public, maybe it’s just between you and me, but it is connected.

Adam Wern: And it could be that your document is there in space and I comment directly on the side of it. It’s it’s not even a process or different spaces. It’s the same space.

Peter Wasilko: Yeah.

Adam Wern: It’s it’s a space for that document or that project.

Mark Anderson: Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Wern: And you comment and anyone can comment in line and you put the next version. Just beside her beside that in the next left to the right.

Frode Hegland: Yes. This is what I think we should work on.

Adam Wern: Here, is that that is one interesting problem for us. But is it the most most interesting? I think that is.

Peter Wasilko: It’s. Why on earth?

Frode Hegland: What happened?

Adam Wern: All my devices, three devices. Call me at the same point when face time. And I don’t see any notification.

Frode Hegland: I’m not saying it should be the only thing we work on, but I think that aspect, whether in my world author, liquid.

Peter Wasilko: Reader.

Frode Hegland: Or in someone else’s world, but ideally across all worlds, should be one of the problems we should work on. How we can have a coherent, written dialogue between us.

Adam Wern: Yeah, it’s a very worthwhile thing. So the question is whether do we have that competency? Competency? What do you say? Competence, competence, competence in this group. Or perhaps, perhaps, I don’t know. I think programming wise and so on, because you have to remember that the we are coders and not really full blown programmers, I think.

Peter Wasilko: Yeah.

Frode Hegland: But but Adam, here’s the thing.

Adam Wern: A typist.

Frode Hegland: I hire programmers when I need it. Not that I have a budget anymore, but.

Adam Wern: But last.

Frode Hegland: Week I.

Adam Wern: Did.

Frode Hegland: Last week I had a meeting. It turns out the head of Dublin Corps was there Wednesday morning at 6:00. I’m having a meeting with their core team because they find visual meta interesting. Right. So just if I could have more feedback on what I’m doing, I can be give more feedback on what you’re doing. We don’t all have to work on the same thing all the time. But to bring it together to help our own discourse, because over the years I’ve seen so many groups being overcome by us save the world, meditate and use technology. Right. And then I see many groups trying to deal with one single detail. I think the reason you and me are the only ones left on the call. We both think this is very important. There are real problems in the world that need solving and the key problem is obviously thinking and communication. And what we have a group that is this warm, this pleasant get to this level of let’s not do this and that. What a prime real estate opportunity to try to fix it.

Adam Wern: Is because this discussion that we have right now, we can’t really for some reason, we have not been able to have that kind of discussion in the group or in text or in images or in VR or whatever. We have to do it often, almost after a fight.

Peter Wasilko: Sort of.

Frode Hegland: Intellectual.

Adam Wern: Fight.

Peter Wasilko: Or.

Frode Hegland: So I’ll beg of you to do one thing between now and Friday. Download any of the PDFs from email.

Peter Wasilko: Or.

Frode Hegland: Issue one or two of the journal. Find even a random.

Peter Wasilko: Thing.

Frode Hegland: And just copy it into author. Write a thing about it, export as a PDF and send it to me. Just so you felt that workflow. All right, that would be really.

Peter Wasilko: Really.

Adam Wern: Because I tried to author for I think a one and a half hour. I did all my writing and that was about one and a half, 2 hours of daily writing in it, just for my personal sake. But I haven’t really had a work that was more note taking or note thinking personal essays the not for anyone else. So I don’t have a workflow where I actually copy paste or a full workflow like you described right now.

Frode Hegland: So because if you do that, then we can just because you know, Mark, one of as many irritating traits as you will point out, bugs and author. There are many and there are many bugs in.

Adam Wern: The world of work.

Frode Hegland: But if we can look at that and if it turns out that we have to restart everything on the web, like Fabian says, fine, we will try to do that. But one of the things I think we have such an opportunity to find ways to make the statements, someone else comment on it, but not just on a chat line, but in a world where these documents persist for a thousand years because not that we are important, but the process is important.

Adam Wern: Yeah, I have to call back now.

Frode Hegland: I have to go eat dinner, which is getting. I get the extra time.

Adam Wern: Me, too.

Peter Wasilko: All right.

Frode Hegland: Talk to you later.