27 May 2024

27 May (2nd) 2024

Frode Hegland: Good morning. Good morning. Mutiny!

Dene Grigar: Hello. So now we have two eyes watching us.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, red eye is mine. I’m experimenting, but Firefly is the one. The other one. If they’re not here, I’m going to remove them. Because that’s. It’s cool enough to hang on.

Dene Grigar: Andrew, I told you you didn’t have to come. You’re camping.

Andrew Thompson: Yeah, but then I ended up coming back in time, so I figured I should be here.

Dene Grigar: Did you have fun? Was it raining on you?

Andrew Thompson: Oh, it was great. And that’s why I’m here. Because it was raining very hard and soaked through the tent, and all of our bedding got wet, but, you know.

Dene Grigar: You know, I always think that, you know, John and I went camping early in our relationship, and I thought it was always a good thing to do because you can see if somebody can handle, you know, difficulties.

Andrew Thompson: Yeah. Simone couldn’t make it, unfortunately. She was working.

Dene Grigar: On. Have you gone camping with her?

Andrew Thompson: No, I haven’t. I want to.

Dene Grigar: Before you marry.

Andrew Thompson: Good idea.

Dene Grigar: Truly.

Frode Hegland: I have to admit, that.

Dene Grigar: Tells you a lot about somebody

Frode Hegland: I’m secretly happy, Andrew, that you ended up being here and not camping. But I’m also secretly happy that I’m not in an environment where you could suggest I go camping with you. That wouldn’t go very well. If it doesn’t have an undo button, I’m not sure how to use it.

Dene Grigar: And you’re my brothers and I used to go every weekend in Texas. We go to Guadalupe River, and we just would have the best time and we’d go tubing down the river. It was just so much fun. And then I don’t didn’t mind sleeping on the ground. You know, back in those days, my bones hurt now. I’ve reached that point where I now want a thick mattress, but I’ve been camping. You know, we we went many, many times. Camped in the snow. That was fun.

Andrew Thompson: Yeah, that’s. That would be something. I think that’d be too cold for me. At least with my current stuff. I need to get a better sleeping bag. Yeah.

Dene Grigar: Well, I’m glad you’re back and you’re safe. And you had a good time. Kind of.

Andrew Thompson: Oh yeah, it was a good time overall. The night not so much, but you know, otherwise. Great.

Dene Grigar: Well, I heard from Richard Holt. You know, I had dinner with Richard Holton Thursday night. And his wife. And Figurski has been published in a new journal. And so we’re getting lots of hits on Figurski right now. And the lab is mentioned, so we’re getting lots of hits from the lab. Oh that’s.

Andrew Thompson: Cool.

Dene Grigar: The international journalism.

Andrew Thompson: One.

Dene Grigar: Yeah, it’s out of Netherlands. So it’s a lot of new people. It’s interactive. It’s interactive fiction people. So it’s really fun. So we’re seeing lots of hits on The Lab and Figurski and other the next, which is great. Good morning Fabian.

Frode Hegland: Good afternoon. Fabian.

Fabien Benetou: Hello. Hello, everyone.

Frode Hegland: Hello, hang on. I think there’s a noise outside. Let me just close my window. Yeah. So Andrew Fabian went camping this weekend and my family did pretty much the opposite. We celebrated my brother’s 50th birthday, so we went to this fancy English countryside home for the weekend. So that was also a strange experience.

Dene Grigar: I didn’t realize he was younger. I thought he was older.

Frode Hegland: Oh, can I hug you? Yeah. No. He is six years younger and his son is exactly six years younger than mine, so that’s kind of cool.

Dene Grigar: That’s cool. What’s your brother’s name? What’s his name?

Frode Hegland: Henning. And Henning Andreas and I’m through to Alexander. So that’s it for anything.

Dene Grigar: They’re very German. I mean very, very Norwegian.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, I guess so. There’s a little bit of German in there with you, Andrea. So that too. So Yeah, we some of us met this morning. Adam was there. His afternoons. Not just his evenings. His afternoons now are impossible. We went through a few things and it was really lovely. We went through primarily Danny, what you and I went through on Friday. So the language seems to have settled on library reading room elements and those kinds of things. So that’s quite good. Who’ve been working on a script, which I think will be really fun for us all to look at, because at least for me, it helps scaffold my imagination. And scaffolding was one of the key things we talked about this morning. It was really nice to dig into Fabian’s notions of end user being able to modify stuff, and so on. The meeting is, of course recorded, transcribed, analyzed, uploaded and all of that good stuff.

Dene Grigar: So let me ask you this question. You’re meeting now with folks earlier than this. It makes no sense to do this meeting anymore.

Frode Hegland: Oh, I don’t agree. I think maybe we can make this shorter. Maybe. But I absolutely think it makes sense, because I’ll give you an example. I thought that the. Okay, one of the things we talked about today was it might be nice to at least envision having a voice assistant once you put the headset on. Whether we will implement that for September or not is quite secondary, but the idea is at least that we think in terms of it, because it helps us make real flows and realize things. And when you have to have someone speak how to use the system, it’s easier to see. We’ve forgotten to do things. So by asking the guys, what should we call this thing? And you know, you and I deny we care about naming and we care about that kind of stuff. And so Fabian said. Lep. You said, let’s play a game. So Fabian said, let’s play a game. You suggest something and we say yes. In other words, they have absolutely no interest in that side of things. So I think these meetings really balance each other out, because when Adam and Fabian was talking, there was a lot of technical stuff where I was basically editing weekend pictures and just listening. So to have two complementary meetings on a Monday I think is really, really good.

Fabien Benetou: On that part.

Frode Hegland: Please.

Fabien Benetou: Don’t don’t hesitate to to interrupt if we get too technical so that even though it might sound too abstract, your opinion might still be valuable. So don’t. Please I mean, I’m not. You do whatever you want, whenever you want, but. But if at some point we go too deep because we use jargon and we use technical words, we we’re at least Adam, I don’t know, but I’m still always happy to expand on what the actual complicated sounding words mean. So don’t don’t hesitate at some point if we if it sounds like gibberish I’ll happily clarify.

Frode Hegland: Oh, yeah. No, it wasn’t a reflection of that Fabian. It was more a reflection on, I think, you know, to have that is really, really worthwhile. And I’m very happy to be part of it and whoever can. But I think it’s quite different from our this time of day meetings. I don’t think they duplicate like in the morning meetings. We’re not going to talk about the symposium nor the book, nor the student competition. None of that’s interesting for that meeting. We’re not going to talk about the wider issues. It’s basically Fabian wants to do this. Adam wants to do this. We’re also working on Andrew’s thing like this. Blah blah blah. How does the Jason travel stuff? How do things happen? So it’s almost like we had the Friday technical meeting before, except it’s the only time that Adam can make it.

Dene Grigar: A couple of things. In the Sloan just not to beat a dead horse with Sloan Foundation grant. And one of the things we talk about is the Monday meetings and how we’re trying to grow those Monday meetings to be a larger community. So we can’t drop this meeting. And it also supposed to be more of a broader look at things like, like it was supposed to be like your. Tradition, right? Like what is the future of text? You know, that discussion that was having happening before the Sloan Foundation grant kind of wrecked it. So if we can pull back on Mondays and go back to what future of text is and have that broader community be built, that’d be helpful. The Friday meetings were good because Andrew was there, and we’re talking about Andrew’s production. The thing that I’m concerned about is that you’ve got production happening over here with Fabian and Adam, and then we have the production with Andrew over here, and they’re not coming together except on Wednesdays after everybody’s done everything. So potentially what what can happen? I’m not saying it’s happened already, but it can Andrew’s work in this direction, doing these things that we tell him to do from Wednesday’s meeting. And then you folks are meeting on Monday doing something else, and then he’s having to go back and change everything he’s already done. So having two production teams and this is for me, running a lab for, you know, over a decade. Two production teams working on the same project, doing different things. But not talking is not a good policy. So what can we do to rectify that? And Andrew’s got his hands up.

Andrew Thompson: Yeah. I just want to say really quick that the two production team thing. Right. If Fabian and Adam’s work are their own sort of environments where they try their own things with the same data then we don’t have to collaborate a bunch, and that’s fine. If they meet separately. We start to get more of a problem when we have the separate planning. And then that feedback comes back as if it needs to be part of my project. And I’ve had no part in that conversation. So it depends on which route you want to go. I think for a while we did want to all have three separate projects so we could demo them all and, and that’s fine if that’s the way if you guys meet separately, I don’t think that’s an issue. If that’s the way we keep going. But yeah, if it’s if it’s feedback on stuff that I need to implement, then it’s harder.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. Absolutely. To to address that. I will probably please take over this, but no, actually, you go first. I’ll wait.

Fabien Benetou: I go first? You go first. I’m confused.

Frode Hegland: Now you go first. Please.

Fabien Benetou: Okay. So first I wish the Monday meeting was the future of text as it was before I missed it. That’s I think it’s really valuable. And I think it logistics and how to get things done right is also important. But I think injecting new ideas, having discussions, guests, etc. I really think it’s valuable. And I, I think if we can kind of maybe keep I don’t know how, but I think basically, yes, keeping Monday as it was, I would prefer this to be honest. And now on on coupling and having two different things. Honestly, I wish we were that productive that we discuss about something on Monday. And then Andrew is far, far behind and it sucks for him. Sorry, Andrew. But we’re not that fast. Like, we we have discussions, we get ideas. And from the time it, like, seeps down, even if we were to do something crazy efficient and implement. Right there because it’s all open source, because we try to explain how it works. And usually there are like, more snippets or short ideas to explore, to see if they make sense. And of course, if we were to meet only, let’s say, once a month, it would be risky. But I’m not too worried about this. And as Andrew, I think highlighted, like if it’s some of small explorations that are not interdependent, I don’t think the risk is too big. But if we do, for example, the maybe the JSON format about having the same thing at the right position or at. Format. And yes, we need to be synchronous and work on actually the same thing. And for that I think we must meet together. But if it’s tiny explorations, I think it’s not too tightly coupled that it’s making a bit risk. Big risk.

Dene Grigar: Let me say this, that, you know, we have we have our own side quest. We got $14,000 of funding from the university and that money is funding, Andrew, separately from this project to build out an XR environment for the visualization space for the neck. So that’s a little side quest that Andrew is doing on this, you know, outside this project. So he’s not getting paid for that through this, this grant. And so with the VR money is for the virtual reality consultants. Xr consultants is to is to augment what Andrew is doing. Right. So Andrew’s doing all the web XR implementation. But then there’s all this stuff that needs to be done beyond that, that Fabian you’re so good at and also Adam. So it’s valuable to pay you both to do these projects, to do this kind of exploration. They’ve got to dovetail with Adam and with Andrew in some way. And so what what I’m asking us to think about is how the three of you can work together more closely, because I’m afraid that what’s going to happen is you’re going to go off this direction, and then he’s going to have to start all over again. And we’re not making any progress on the webXR part. And he’s going to get frustrated and he’ll leave us. So we don’t want to be doing that. And as a project manager for years, you never have two teams working in different directions on the same project. Right. They have to come together. And so, you know, I know you’re meeting at a time that’s more convenient for European time, but if there can be some sort of communication about what you’re planning to do at the meeting on Monday at early in the morning, our time so that Andrew could read that when he gets up. Respond to it, but then somehow, you know, meet during the week, the three of you, so you can hash out these things. I don’t want to see Andrew having to redo things. Have you had to do that yet, Andrew, at all?

Andrew Thompson: I’ve had to redo stuff, but that’s a lot of just because of the, the design changing. And that’s like a process we knew would happen. And it’s never fun as a developer. But considering we’re in a prototype project, I at least know to expect it a bit.

Dene Grigar: But nothing significant yet. So we, you know, catch us while we can before it gets out of hand. Does that make sense?

Andrew Thompson: Yeah, I try to bring it up. If. And I’m. I’m fine with doing whatever the group decides. But if we end up going a direction that would sort of overwrite a bunch of development progress, I do mention it. And so far, the group’s been pretty receptive to. At least hearing what I have to say. It’s. Yeah. So it’s been it’s been fine.

Frode Hegland: Proto. Yeah. So as far as Yeah. Fabian. Go.

Fabien Benetou: Very briefly, I think in the state we’re in redoing stuff I think is positive. If it’s small things, if it’s small things, because I end up myself in my own project on my own, I’m not even collaborating with someone. And yet, let’s say a couple of months down the line I need to rewrite code because I learn more about the environment and I can re like, remove lines of code, basically, or refactor. And I don’t want to send myself flowers, but usually if I redo it a second time, it’s better than the first one. And that means in the long term, it’s going to be clear. So obviously it should not be a waste of time that we do something. And then Andrew has to backtrack a lot and have to redo a lot. No, but redoing a little bit, in my experience at least can be positive because you get basically. That’s also when I told a couple of days that I’ve rewrote. No, I’m sorry, I told our Dutch friend in Hungary. Anyway. It’s fine. The. Yeah, I can if I redo it a second time or even a third time, I usually can do it can do more with less code. And that’s very valuable in term of collaboration. Then more people can pick it up. So it’s not it’s hopefully it’s not a waste to redo a little bit.

Dene Grigar: Let me mention that I like to go back to go back to the importance of the Monday feature of text meetings, because right now we only have. Four of us here, and I know Peter has to take his mother out today. Randall can’t come on Mondays, but we’re missing a lot of other people that that could be here. So don’t want to see the numbers drop on our Monday meetings. They should be growing. And I think it’s been hard for the last couple of weeks because we’ve been so focused on the ACM hypertext conference in our papers. That’s kind of behind us. I’ve turned in my paper. I don’t know what the status is of the other ones. But certainly Mondays can go back to talking about the general notion of future of text. And it doesn’t have to be in just an XR, but also AI and other things.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. Right. So. Several things. As far as I feel. Yes, Monday should be broadened, and Fabian is one of the main people to make them broader because he’s looking for people to do guest presentations, which has been very good. One of the people we hoped we would have do guest presentations. Sorry, my computer chat thing went funny. We’re actually seeing on Saturday in person here in London, so we’ll, you know, see if he will join us later. But when it comes to what Fabian and Adam is doing, I see that as being very complementary to Adam, not telling Adam what to do. It is very important that we make our system open. Of course, that’s one of the key things we all strongly agree on. So that means that we will be But that’s random. It means that the JSON discussion that we’re having now is extremely pertinent, because that is how we share the information, and that isn’t straightforward technical. There are design issues around that too, or what kind of information should be shared. So that’s very important. But I do feel we need much more time on design. One of the things I thought would be nice.

Frode Hegland: Oh, by the way, the reason we’re not so many here today is partly it’s a national holiday here in the UK, so Mark is off with family things. So that’s another reason. So we’re a little shorter. Leon was part of the meeting this morning for a bit that he couldn’t make it today. But yeah we should actually make it more but technically what we’re building. You know, we have had the discussion for a few weeks of what to put in the view, where we see a lot of things, you know, with The View doesn’t have a name yet. That’s the kind of discussion that’s a little difficult to cram into our Wednesday discussions, because it tends to be, you know, several different things. And then we have time to look at the brilliant work Andrew is doing and make small comments on maybe. Then why don’t we just have the conversation in voice so we don’t. So we Okay, okay, okay, I’ll stop talking. Shall we shorten the Monday to an hour? If you want to do that, that’s absolutely fine by me.

Dene Grigar: Reason I’m saying that is that you’re already meeting with people before this meeting, and it’s going to be two hours, but.

Frode Hegland: Nobody I was talking, I was responding to you guys and I, you know, let a lot of commentary go through. It’s a bit destructive, distracting when it comes in the chat, you know, main thing. The work that Fabian and Adam is doing, to my understanding, is technically not that related to Andrew. It’s not like it’s going to plug in directly. But the idea, as I see it is that while you’re in the library, for instance, you want to choose to see something in the Fabian way or the Adam Way. That’s really important. So I can see how we will need to look at data sharing a lot. But when it comes to the what you do in it, I think they are quite different discussions over.

Dene Grigar: Okay. I’d like to go back to the Monday meetings again. So how long is your meeting, your your design meeting on Mondays with Fabian and Adam?

Frode Hegland: Well, we only had one and it was just today. And today it was two hours. Adam was there for the two hours, as was I, but both Fabian and Leon only had an hour each. That’s all they’d fit today, because it wasn’t clear that today was going to be a test of the Monday meetings. I think it is totally fine for us to really define what those meetings are, and I don’t think it’s fair to ask Adam, Fabian or anyone else in this time zone to have to go to every Monday morning meeting. Maybe we do it. So if they have things for what they are building, they want to discuss, we do that. I completely agree with you guys in general that the Monday afternoon these meetings should be back to general future texts. My only concern is, as Adam pointed out, we’ve talked about the view of things all over the place, but we haven’t really talked about the reading view. So if we can maybe have more time on Wednesdays to talk about that, you know what is on screen, what can people do? I feel we’re lacking time for the specific I’m an XR. Here are the things what can I do? And not just as a use case, but as a very, very detailed discussion. Andrew has really caught our slack a lot. He has put so many things in the interface based on the discussion. It’s very impressive, and I really think we all need to be more part of that discussion. So I think it’s the morning meetings. What do you want to get out of them? Because they were started primarily because of Adam’s schedule. But what do you do? You want them to be the morning, want to be shorter or etc.?

Fabien Benetou: I mean, to me it’s always the shortest, the better. And then we expand. If we see, oh, there is either a rush or a need for it. So. Yeah, I also that’s what I said a couple of weeks ago when we started to have this discussion due to Adam’s timing restrictions. Yeah. Requirements, let’s say, or constraints that I’m happy to try and then I see, because indeed, if if we repeat what we say in the morning, in the afternoon, I obviously don’t want to do this. If there is also no value into doing it because we wait, let’s say, for the afternoon to have a proper discussion. No point. If there is both no overlap, that their discussion may be more technical or design in the morning and then more theoretical in the afternoon. And we still manage to somehow have let’s say, a summary or way to make it, to keep it inclusive in term of sparkling, sparkling discussions. After that, I think that would be the best. But but yeah, I as per usual, at least I hope I try to say yes and then adjust over time. So because it was the very first one, now I’m I say it was interesting. We had an interesting conversation. Would it be interesting every week and we will we manage to, let’s say, have enough quality topics that are different and yet built on top of each other because we managed to summarize enough or connect, I don’t know. So as per usual, I’m happy to as long as it doesn’t, let’s say, require like four hours of meeting itself and three days of preparation and workload that I can’t do. Then. Yeah. Happy to to go on like this and adjust.

Frode Hegland: The the balance of the of these meetings is interesting, of course, because right now. Design wise, I think we’re running quite far behind. Implementation wise, I think we’re doing really well. So we also do absolutely need to broaden the audience for who can be heard Mondays. So I’m wondering if maybe we do a split on a Monday in the in this meeting. One hour catching up on fot the other hour. Very loose I don’t. I’m assuming that was not a magic wand. Brundle. But your cat, right? Okay. Just checking. We’re just going through a little bit about our timings and schedules because we had today we started with a meeting European time in the morning for Adam, because he can’t do evenings at the moment. So Fabian was there for a bit. Well, for an hour, and Leon was there for an hour. So we’re looking into how that fits with what we’re doing here. And also, Denny pointed out that these meetings are the Monday ones are supposed to be more inclusive and not just Sloan. Sorry, my computer is being funny. Sloan design based. So as I pretend that the text here I did upload a summary of today’s meeting in slack. So it is there. Should there be an interest in it? Summary, video and transcript. Maybe we should do a different once I. Sorry. Yeah, maybe we should. Okay, let me put it this way. There are some things we need to still discuss. We need to discuss the broad space. And we need to discuss the. I’m interacting primarily with one document. Where should we have those discussions and how should we handle them to to make sure we get the most inclusive design? Danny, please.

Dene Grigar: Yeah. So one thing we laid out at the very beginning in January, during your visit, was the relationship between Future of Text and the Future of Text and XR project for Sloan. And one thing I didn’t want to do is have the Sloan Project. Disrupt the beauty of the Future of Text project, which was open discussion. Lots of people talking about the future of text, which I find very interesting. So I wanted to keep those separate. So I recommended the Wednesday meetings for the XR project, for the Sloan project, and the Mondays would stay intact for the Future of Text Project. And then we realized we needed a design meeting. So we started the Friday meetings. That was Andrew and whoever could be there to talk about design. The Friday meetings didn’t work because that was not a good time for people. So that that was moved from my from what I understand to Monday before this meeting. My concern is that you’ve got these wonderful folks meeting in the earlier on a Monday European time, and then having to come back in the evening to talk about future of text. And that’s a lot of time for those people. That’s four hours on a Monday and they’re, you know, some of them are getting paid, but there’s a lot of volunteer people. So it makes more sense if we’re going to do a design meeting to have that separate from the future of text Monday morning meetings here.

Dene Grigar: My time. And make this, this meeting shorter like an hour. In that way, you know it’s not going to be such a such a imposition on the folks in Europe who are going to the earlier meeting on Monday. That’s a that’s a recommendation. But just in, in effect, what we tell the Sloan Foundation and the grant is that this is a separate project. We’re going to help build the future of tech’s community through the symposium, the book and the Monday lab meetings, which are supposed to be building. We haven’t done much on that in that arena on Mondays. And then we moved to the Monday meetings, the discussion of the papers, because we had to. I’d like to pull back from the Sloan Foundation discussions on Monday mornings so we can talk more, more readily about the more broader notion of future of text. Yeah, you’re right, you’re right Andrew. But so that’s my my take on it. So I feel like we need to do more to build the community. And it’s not going to happen. And a lot of these folks that are coming, they can’t stay two hours. I mean, if we’re going to be building this community in hours all the time, they’ve got. So let’s make it from 8 to 9 or, you know, so that people can come and then do your meeting earlier and but just make sure Andrew’s in the loop. That’s my suggestion as a project manager.

Frode Hegland: So as is referred to in the text chat here, the and as you mentioned, just to keep it all on the transcript, any the Friday meetings were, of course, technical design. They were not interaction design meetings. And I think a test case is how we now should discuss how we should interact with a document in front of us and how.

Dene Grigar: I thought we weren’t using the chat. They were using voice. No, no, no, but use the chat anymore.

Frode Hegland: I am now speaking it. It was written there as a note and I’m now speaking it. So the Friday meetings were technical design. They were not interaction design. And I don’t think we’ve done enough interaction design discussions because there are so many unknowns. So I think that it could be useful to on Mondays to have part of it be interaction design discussions. I think people coming into our discussions would like that, provided it’s clear what it is, because I’ve done 360 of these meetings recorded and, you know, the first many hundreds, there were some good ones, of course there were. But they could often kind of spiral a little bit. Now we’re extremely lucky. We have a specific thing we’re doing which anchors even the general discussion a little bit, I feel. So that’s why I think how we’re going to discuss how we interact with the documents as a pop up book, so to speak. I interact with a wider view. We need to get that done. And once days don’t seem to have the the shape for them, it seems. So for this meeting, for instance, I had prepared the beginnings of a script idea. And considering the workload that you so rightly point out, we can’t really expect people to work other than Andrew outside of hours, so to speak, outside of these meetings. So there isn’t actually that much design thinking happening that is being fed in through, you know, writings or diagrams or whatever. So is it fair enough if we As a test case. If you guys tell me how you would like to discuss the design issues, the interaction design issues. We all agree we need more though, right? Because we’re heading into building more stuff and we don’t actually know what that should be. Put on.

Brandel Zachernuk: I think at this point is that irrespective of how much the project needs, there is a value and a utility to having a generalized sort of venue and context for talking about future of text as a concept. Completely aside from the from the Sloan project. And I, I think that’s really an important point for people who have. No. Because if people come in cold and are just interested in what text is, then that this is the only time and place that that we have for them that isn’t sort of dealing with the minutia of the, the specifics of a of a of an important but, but a specific project which may not be their project. And certainly, you know, nobody who isn’t already part of the community can be relied upon to do so. And I, you know, I. From Dennis perspective. I also understand that like that is the thing that she is actually on the hook for. So I appreciate the generosity of saying, like having a place that is completely delineated, as distinct from the project is actually has a lot of value is both true and also you know puts puts the resources for the project under, you know, ever so slight amount of pressure. So, yeah, I agree and I think that the needs of what needs to be done for the project versus what what is a valid thing for the idea of an open channel are distinct.

Frode Hegland: Thank you.

Dene Grigar: I do want to say I’ll be starting the June 1st is when I’ll start the six month report that’s due to Sloan, and I’ll have to report on the progress of the project, which I think has gone really well. Progress of the symposium, which is the planning is going really well. And the book and I think the one area we need to build on is this Monday meeting stuff. And one thing we can do, Froda, is that we have folks that are rsvping to the conference, Matt Kirschenbaum being one of them as of this weekend. And he’s interested in I. So it might be fun to talk about AI and invite Matt maybe to come in and chat with us one day. He’s on the East Coast at Maryland, so it wouldn’t be so hard for him to be here at 11:00 during the summer, so he might want to come and join us. Yeah, someone like that might want to ask Mez Breeze to come in and show her. Give her, give us a little sample of her work for those folks that have not seen it before, because her idea of text is very different than ours that we’ve been discussing. So that might be a fun thing to think about doing and start increasing that that membership, that group that comes on Monday.

Frode Hegland: The Monday meetings, the successful ones generally had a theme. That are emailed to people. So maybe we do that. Or maybe, maybe we don’t. Maybe we do. For the sake of throwing ideas out there. We have. For a while we had a monthly special presentation that someone come in. Those meetings were much better attended and they were announced to the Fot and wider community. So maybe we do either monthly themed or every two weeks themed, so that there’s a bit of a time for a bit of a build up and people can take that time, and then we take the other Mondays purely on interaction design, at least for a while, because right now I think that is something we really, really need to do. And then on Wednesdays we can talk about the under the hood connections, JSON and so on. And also the to show Fabian and Adam work when Adam can be there, in addition to the main of going through Andrew work, I don’t know.

Dene Grigar: It’s really hard writing a grant. The hardest part about writing a grant? And I will go on record saying this in the I. That we’re doing. And that is. Is that you have to promise things. It’s kind of like writing a syllabus for a class, right? We’re expected to turn in the syllabus before the class starts to the university, and most folks don’t. Most faculty don’t even look to see who’s in their classes. They just they have 24 people or 30 people or 100 people in their class, and they just write a syllabus, right? Not not even realizing what the room looks like. So even if you know what the room looks like and who’s in your class and what their expertise is, you still have to turn in a syllabus. You go into the class, you realize that these folks are are actually quite advanced. So you have to start redoing your syllabus. And revising it, and you revise it as you go. But at the same time, you can’t change the grading scale because then students get mad at you. When you write a grant, it’s the same problem. You have to write something before you start the project. You’re supposed to know the project so well that you can write about it right, and promise all these things.

Dene Grigar: And then when you get to it, there’s all these things that happen, right? Time zone, you know people getting busy, you know, all these things that happen and you just but you made these promises and so it’s really hard. And this I want to go on record also saying this is Froda’s project. This is his thing he wanted to do. And I’m interested in ZR2, but I’m a completely different direction of XR. I’m more into the, you know, the images and and movement and games and that type of expression. So trying to bring us together. But this was his project that I wanted to see come to fruition. And supported it. And so I don’t I didn’t have all the pieces writing this. And we’re trying to write this together and it’s hard. So we, you know, we we’re finding these little points where we’re having we’re kind of hitting a wall and where I like to step back for a second is say that the future of Tech’s Monday meetings are important. And you did a good job these years holding this. We should honor those Monday meetings from that perspective. But we also need to from the Sloan Foundation grant, which we promised. And we’re and I’m on the hook for. So as Brandon Randall says, so.

Frode Hegland: Well, I mean, for what we’ve told Sloan. You know, we. We will be holding the meetings and we will make them open. We haven’t made more promises for the Monday meetings than that, and I believe from the writing, the Future of Tech Symposium is is a big deal to broaden the community. And you know, we have dinner, you and me, of course, we have to finalize the student competition, which which is getting to be quite important and then and then make them public. But I do feel strongly that this year we have an insanely incredible opportunity. And the fact that we’re building something together, you know, for every year of doing the book, for instance, we’ve talked in the community generally about we should have software to view the book in XR. Now we’re doing it. Now we’re doing that because we can easily, once we have the proceeding system, we can easily package our own book to be viewed in exactly the same way. You know, that’s why logically, proceedings and our book is the same thing, right? So to have that dialog with the wider community around the general notion of the future of text, I’ve been doing that for 13 years, 13, 14 years, and I would have continued to do it.

Frode Hegland: But to have a kind of a totem pole to revolve it around. Now, the actuality of what I’m doing, I think, is much more exciting for people in general too. But and I do, by the way, I don’t think we’re polarizing each other. I think we’re circling the same thing because I do agree the Monday meeting shouldn’t just be what button do we put here? No. Absolutely not. If in the meetings on Mondays it goes into, you know, what is important is for this and that to happen. And someone starts talking about something far off. Absolutely. Fine. For a few minutes, you know, someone will take it somewhere else. So. Probably what I’m suggesting here. We, you know, we keep making clear to everyone we’re working on this. We’re discussing on Mondays. Please join us in the conversation will go broad and then monthly or so will have a specific topic. In this area. There’s a vibe with people. That was a massive question and I was drinking, so please talk. Was that far off or was that close to what we’re feeling?

Dene Grigar: Seems like we’re still talking about our project on Mondays. And I think what we what we want to do is be a little more open like it was before.

Frode Hegland: A little more open. But the problem with what it was before, you know, there were a few meetings where it was only me that wasn’t fun. You know, there were a few meetings. I mean, as I said, I had 360 of them so far. We’re almost at 365, so we should party. Okay. And there were quite a few that just, you know, there was a big churn of people, you know, if you go back and look at them, the people are not there anymore. I mean, Fabian is one of the longest serving members, so to speak. And, you know, Brandel, you’ve been there a long time. You’ve been in and out for years as well. So I do think that if. Okay, first of all, let me make it clear, I agree we should make Monday more inclusive. I agree we shouldn’t make it so technical that a new person wouldn’t be interested. Completely agree. But I think that if we go out on Twitter, by the way, it has to be called Twitter because you can retweet something you can’t read exit. So then X doesn’t mean anything anyway. If we go out on social media a bit more actively announced what we’re doing, if we say, you know, future of text Monday Times, so and so, we’re working on reading in XR.

Frode Hegland: We have something we’re working on. You can check it out here, but the discussion is wider. I think that would help the discussion. I’m sorry. Andrew. Just just to add on to that. I’ve been trying to get stronger dialog for the future of text for 20 years now. The only time the dialog has progressed a bit has been when there’s been something more specific to talk about. And I think that what we’re doing in Sloan gives us that. So I don’t think it closes down inclusion for people. I think it gives them more of a focus to understand how they can contribute in the discussion. However, having said that, Denny, you and I come from different areas into the text space. So considering the notion of maybe bringing back the monthly meetings, maybe we have monthly meetings that are more on the humanity side or Denny, you decide on the theme and specifically invite that cohort of people as well. Cohort is not the right word. I apologize, but you invite people specifically in that space. And then, you know, those days are that. Because if we don’t do something more specific for our Mondays, I think it’s going to be a little wishy washy. Danny. First and then Andrew. I’m sorry. Andrew.

Dene Grigar: Andrew. You go away. We love you. I like the idea of. I mean, one of the problems we’re having right now is bringing our language together, bringing our terminology together, bringing our our two worlds, our multiple worlds together. And I think the way to do that is, once again, going back and looking at, you know, what has been done before. So the book club idea where we’re looking at, you know, this is what Benedict said, this is what Rushkoff says. This is what all the you know, this is what you know. Doug says. This is, you know, let’s go back and revisit some of that, maybe not read a book, but read passages. And talk about that. And dig a little bit. You know, I know you call it navel gazing, but dig a little bit into the intellectual navel gazing.

Frode Hegland: I said, some of it is, and I think that is a good thing. Just like design is often navel gazing at all meant to disparage that. I think it is very important that we continue that. Dini.

Dene Grigar: Well, do you think it’s important to talk about the intellectual part of all of this? And I think that is what. I gravitate to two things. I like the I mean, I’m not a theory head by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve never been a French post-structuralist. I’ve never gotten into that world of of literary theory. But I do like looking at the past and seeing what people have said. You know, what theories you know, have they put forward and what has survived, what has been made true? You know which ones are not theories anymore. I like that historical look at things to see where we are today, because it tells us where we might need to go next. So I love that. So. So the monthly Monday Book Club and our reading club call it reading reading text club, something I don’t know.

Frode Hegland: But monthly or bi weekly.

Dene Grigar: Well, twice a month or whatever, I don’t care. Once a month is fine. I’m just saying that we should probably do it a little bit so that we can bring in some other folks, and we can do bring in artists to talk about art, the textual aspect of art in XR, because Mez Breeze is not a writing person. She’s a visual person. Like when you look at Inanimate Alice that she built this. I mean, really and truly this, it’s very visual. It’s not a lot of text. And she had a hard time putting text in it, so. But

Frode Hegland: Oh. Sorry, Danny.

Dene Grigar: And then Caitlin Fisher’s work. I mean, there’s lots of folks like that that are looking at XR for their work and could dovetail with us and want to be at the symposium. And if I get the funding from the Warhol Foundation, I’ll be able to pay them an artist’s fee and show their work at this, the exhibition I want to do.

Frode Hegland: So, yeah, I mean, they’re both in previous books, which is perfect that they continue. So before I give the mic to Andrew bi weekly or monthly guys, for this I suggest bi weekly. Good. Everyone is in sperm agreement. Okay, Andrew.

Andrew Thompson: This is kind of jumping topics back a bit. But I notice we’re we’re talking about bringing the Monday meetings back to the way they once were. Which I may never have seen what those were. But, you know, it’s still a theoretical. And also, we’ve been talking about trimming the Monday meetings to just an hour. I wonder if it would be useful to just combine that where the Monday meetings, the first hour is just locked in as what it used to be, and then the second hour is optional, but you can continue it as they are now. And we’ll of course have some people leave at that hour mark. And those who want to stay behind and discuss design and things like that could.

Dene Grigar: Yeah, that’s a good idea. And then that way, because I need to get to campus when school starts. On Mondays. And so That makes it possible for me to do the 8:00 to nine here, and then 9 to 930 and then take off at 930. Andrew doesn’t go to campus on Monday, so he could stay to the meetings till ten.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. Okay. So, Fabian, what would you prefer? Split Monday meetings into two hours or have full and then every two weeks.

Brandel Zachernuk: I don’t know that I have a strong preference. I mean, the thing that has impacted me most recently is that I got too busy to be able to give much time to this. And my time should be coming back, but it can go away again at some point. So I think. I think. Being able to kind of schedule. Interesting stuff. Infrequently is probably generally better for people to be able to commit to than for having a little bit here and there because so, so maybe just an hour fortnightly is is as much because, you know, there’s, there are two things. There’s like, there’s general calls on people’s time and there’s the sort of novelty and the specificity and the generality of, of the content that is there as a draw for people, as an attempt to kind of cultivate and grow a community of people who have a venue that is more generally open for them to be able to talk about their ideas as well. So yes, future of text per se has this project, but other people have other projects. So, you know, Raphael has napkin and and other folks you know, who want to talk about those things. It would be really valuable for them to be able to see this as a place to be able to do that. And yeah, so I, I would think honestly, like, it sounds like maybe you’re thinking two hours fortnightly, but I would even go less or more, possibly even one hour monthly. It’s about the, the quality of the thing that you can suggest to people and the, and the lead time that you can you can work it out so that people can kind of move their schedules around so that they, they can make a thing that contains enough of a draw for them to be able to, to, to get to and recognize as a, as a regular thing.

Dene Grigar: Yeah, I was going to say to answer, to build on that and to add to what you’re talking about, Froda, is that some of the readings we could be doing is on design, like best practices of design. It doesn’t have to all be theory, right? But I was thinking of something, even looking at the notion of of interactivity from Janice, Janet Murray’s perspective and how it how we’ve moved a little bit different direction with interactivity, understanding that. That Non-trivial activity doesn’t ruin immersion, right? So looking at these kind of concepts as they impact the project that we’re working on. So it doesn’t have to be something totally outside of the project. It’s something that can build on our thinking. We need to bring our brains together into one place so that we can have common language, common ideas. We can share these things more readily.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, hugely agree what I mean design by the way, I’m talking about specific design for specifically what we’re building now. But I think to put the summary in the chat, I think we have a solution. What we should do is combine everything we just said. Meaning every two weeks we have a themed meeting that we announce to the world that will last one hour. After that hour, we will move into the business at hand with Sloan. Quite clearly, if people want to stay for that because they want to see real world XR building, they are extremely welcome to. But they shouldn’t feel that they have to stay there for longer. If sometimes the discussion goes a bit longer, that’s not exactly a problem either. How does that sound?

Dene Grigar: I think we can make that work with the Sloan Foundation Grant.

Frode Hegland: I am happy with that. Good. Very good, by the way.

Dene Grigar: To get there. But.

Frode Hegland: Okay, so to talk about the design for a minute before we do other things. So I had a frustration last week with how to do annotations in reader. I then called Denny. We had a lovely chat going through annotations in reader to be extended into here. The reason for it was Mark helping me do my thesis editing or whatever. He was annoyed that software isn’t really optimized for editing or in reviewing. It is for reading or writing. So all that was done was instead of just having colors as an annotation option, you have what we call semantic annotation for the lack of a more pretentious term. All it means is that you have categories of what you want to do. Some. Often you want to annotate based on your own preference for your own reading. Interesting or nonsense. You know, green and red, that’s clear kind of thing. You will also, in the academic world, do annotations for other people, like helping someone with their papers, like not logical or grammar. You know, you will have a few kind of keys. Can’t remember exactly what they are, but Denny and I went through them, wrote them down. It was great. That’s now being implemented. It should have been done today. It might be done. Anyway, it should be ready for Wednesday for you all to try if you want. The point of that being and part of this discussion is one thing that’s become very clear.

Frode Hegland: Well, this part from the very beginning, reading and writing are intertwined. So for us to say reading one year, authoring next year is semi fake. Of course, we all think that. But we had to say something. So what we’re now building with the key main Andrew work will, as I know we agree at some point involve not only choosing from a preceding what is interesting and what is not, but also different means to annotate, to note down how we feel about that work. This is a discussion that’s really core to all the work, because my dream, and I think we share this dream, is that if we start in Andrew webXR or wherever, and then we choose to switch over to view it in Adam World or Fabian World, our annotations should carry across at least our semantic meaning of them. You know, they might use a different thing, but if I’m highlighting, you know, these things are terrible in a paper and then I go read it in a completely different view. That has to come with it. So that’s why the technical architectural things will have to support that. I just think it’s been really, really exciting. We discussed it on Friday Denim and this morning we had some discussions on it too. I think. This really gets to the core of what we’re doing. Any questions on that? I have one other thing to say up to that.

Frode Hegland: No. Okay. So. I’m quite excited by the notion of having a person or a voice inside our system. So I’ve written the very beginning of the script, and it’s really meant to help us walk through and see if we’ve forgotten something. So I’ll read a little bit of this. It’s not very long, but please feel free to interrupt me just by speaking at any time. Don’t do the hand. I won’t see it. So I put them in section welcome start move to reading presentation and so on. So. We were talking about a name this morning and the guys didn’t want to do one, so I suggested the following. Anyway, welcome. I’m your digital voice assistant DV also pronounced Dave. Here to present you with your options and listen to your every command. Please note that you can always ask, what can I say? And I’ll show you a list of options that will be relevant to you. You can also ask me to pause at any time you wish and then simply say, go on or continue when you’re ready. The reason for the name Divi is Adam was suggesting that we shouldn’t have it too humanized. But then Divi can also be pronounced Dave, so it kind of defeats that whole thing. What do you feel about the general notion of such an introduction before The Voice shows you what to use and if thoughts?

Dene Grigar: And we have a less gendered name. Can we not call it Dave?

Frode Hegland: I actually wanted to call it Danny. And I thought you might find that. No, you’re bossing me around by saying, Deanie, this and that all the time. Yeah, I’m happy to to think of it.

Dene Grigar: Passing you around. No.

Frode Hegland: No, I just thought I want to. Yeah. There. Yes, we can think of that. The only issue with that is if we have it in a voice. It’s going to. I think it’ll be harder to get a less gendered voice. And very often these systems are female. So that’s why I thought, okay, let’s do male because assistant I mean Apple was actually sued because Lisa was sorry. Siri was a female voice, you know. But I don’t know.

Dene Grigar: There’s names that are not gendered. I mean, there’s names that.

Frode Hegland: But voices are harder now.

Dene Grigar: I don’t know the the androgynous voice we used in portal. Was fantastic. We took we took a voice and made it very androgynous. It could be male or female. And the character itself. We move from being male because we really didn’t know holmer’s gender. Really we don’t. And or if they even existed. So we turned Homer into a non-gendered character. And that worked out really well because it made everybody feel inclusive. And it answered the question that Greek scholars have been asking for years is, who in the hell is Homer and where do they come from? So we can do that. And I mean that. There’s nothing wrong with that. And I’m not bossing you around. I’m just making a suggestion.

Frode Hegland: No, no, the other way around that we would sound like we’re bossing you around by saying. Deanie. What’s this? Deanie. Do that. That’s what I meant. If Deanie was the name of the. Of the. Yeah. Andrew, please.

Andrew Thompson: So I got a quick question, which then determines what I have to say about it. What is the main point of having the voice? Is it to give like character to the work, or is it to give instruction? Obviously it accomplishes both, but like, what’s the main focus?

Frode Hegland: The main focus is actually neither one of those. In my mind. The main focus is to help us design this, because after this initial sentence or paragraph, it it speaks to the user, but we may not actually need it. It’s just that, as you say, when you present, when you tell someone what something is, it becomes more real, right? So. So this is a way for us to have scenarios to make it real. But also a little bit of character and a little bit of instruction. But please, please go on with the second part of your question. Sorry, I couldn’t answer that. Okay.

Andrew Thompson: Well, if I I’ll just I’ll just I’ll just go through both then because I’m not sure which route. If it’s for instruction it’s basically a tutorial. Which means that anyone who’s been in the work before and is coming back to it is going to want to skip this. So I would say when you’re entering before you’ve done anything, you’ve got you’re looking at that sphere. There should be an option on the side that says like enable audio tutorial or something or voice assistant or something, and you can turn that on and then enter and then it’ll give you the spiel so you can skip that entirely once you’ve already heard it. The other thing is if it’s if it’s for personality a lot of the AI assistants have, like, they obviously give the instruction and try to be useful, but they all have their own little like personality quirks to make them interesting. Just bits of connotation with their voice and stuff like that. We’ve moved a bit away from just the flat, monotone robot voice. Just because it’s boring to listen to and you want to just turn it off. So if, if DV or Dave or whatever we name it is going to just be reciting information. Could go either way, but maybe we could consider giving them a little bit of a personality, make it more engaging.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, I’ll share a little bit of that. But also one thing that Adam is very excited about is voice interaction. And I’ve been quite against that because it’s text, text, text. However, to find a a good way where voice interaction is augmented by text rather than competing against it. For instance, the biggest issue I have with working in XR is the cannot touch things. And as you all know, I’m not particularly fond of the laser pointer. So to be able to if feasibly we can get to a point where you know, you’re looking at a word on the screen and it says fantastical and you say. But look up the word fantastical. You don’t have to select it. You just speak it. Right. So it would also be a conversational interface. But let me give you 10s of this.

Speaker6: Welcome on your digital voice assistant DV also pronounced Dave here to present you with your options and listen to your every command. Please note that you can always ask what can I say?

Frode Hegland: Right, so there are some amazing audio qualities. That’s a completely synthetic thing. But for now, maybe we. Consider what you said about male female and just leave that for now. Let’s not just barge ahead with Dave. No, what I’m saying, but let’s think about the script and of itself to help us do the thing. Maybe I don’t know, what do you think I got?

Dene Grigar: So I just looked up names that are neutral, that are used by men and men and women. And there’s bunches of them, of course.

Frode Hegland: No. Of course. Yes.

Dene Grigar: So let me let me mention a couple that I thought were interesting. Ariel would be really interesting because Ariel is the spirit in, in Shakespeare’s in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Right. And was the kind of a guide, the opposite of Kalibanos. Of Caliban. And so Ariel might be an interesting one, because it could be. Non-gendered. Another one is Tracee, but I like Ariel a lot, and something like that. And the voice. Her British accent, which is Americans love. Right? You have a British accent. You’re smart, you’re French. You’re really cool. So yeah, I mean, I don’t care about the accent at all. And the voice could sound a little more masculine, but the name could be definitely kind of mess that up a little bit. And that would satisfy a lot of I mean, I mean, I don’t keep harping on the Sloan Foundation grant, but one thing we promised was diversity. And we’re not doing it yet. And that’s bugging me.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, no, that’s a fair point. And also, I really don’t mind having a female voice. I purposefully went against it because of the issue Apple had with Siri, where they were sued for being a female voice, because.

Dene Grigar: That female voice is very, very female. I mean, I don’t think I have a feminine voice, but I’m female. I think I have a very. Loud, masculine voice which upsets people.

Frode Hegland: No you haven’t. You have a feminine voice, but you don’t have a girly, singsong voice. That’s very I don’t, I don’t.

Dene Grigar: Brandel is going to say something.

Brandel Zachernuk: I’m so. I like text. Sorry, I like speech, I like I like having speech feedback. I don’t know that I necessarily buy the utility in a personifying an agent that is responding by text at all, like, do you need to have a character or is this just the system? And I also don’t like the so you said that respond to your every command. And it’s I that that might just be just one comment, but it’s like it’s one sort of part of this, the overall statement. But it could be. Laying on the subservience and power fantasy notion a little further. And so, you know two things. Does it need to be an agent or can this just be the system is a question that I would pose. And two is is the what to what extent is it. Providing value to underscore the power dynamics with this framing of like, I’m here at your beck and call, oh my God, I would die for you. You know, I just, I, I don’t I don’t love that. So I, I don’t but I yeah. So in terms of speech, I think speech is good. I really like the, the combination of speech with the visualization of text and having the ability to locate things in particular places. I’m not sold that. It needs to be again, revised and and personified into a specific character, unless it serves that purpose and in particular, unless there are multiple agents that sort of form like constitute different roles and, and have different purposes, or in a context in which you’re having an explicit interaction with a person here and then the agent here. I like names, don’t like if you’re if you’re just talking to one person all the time, you never use their name. You you’re just anytime you speak, you know, it’s to them. So Yeah. So like is it this does does there need to be a distinct entity from the system in which you’re sort of operating versus the agent? Is the is the main question? I think I have.

Frode Hegland: Any sort of okay. If I go straight on that.

Dene Grigar: Yeah. I do want to build on something he said, because I think what he said was really important, because I think the problem with Siri was not the feminine voice, it was the fact that she was like a slave. And when you say, I’ll be here at your beck and call to do whatever you frigging want, and your female voice, that adds problems. So I think the idea that we’re here, we’re here to give you instruction, we’re here to be here to give you advice and then have a more neutral voice or doesn’t matter. I mean, just be diverse.

Frode Hegland: Right? Yeah, absolutely. So there are many things going on here. The point of the script is none of this. The point of the script is to walk you through and to walk us through what what can happen. I think it would be even be too long to actually use it when it comes to the actual voice assistance. With all due respect, Randall, I don’t like having to say Siri. You know, with my watch, I don’t. And one of the things we talked about this morning was in Star Trek, the way I think the logic is, you tap your communicator like, you know, lift your watch exactly the same, and you say, Emily, could you come here a second? And the system interprets the first thing as being the address, because there’s a limited vocabulary. Emily means my wife takes that as an audio sample, sends it to Emily. If she then taps her communicator and says, yes, I’ll come right away, or replies, and somehow then you have a voice line. That it means that the command becomes the ringtone, so to speak, right? There’s no reason for me to to say what was the name of the the computer in the computer, like in Star Trek to say Siri all the time.

Frode Hegland: I agree with you to say Dave, all the time. I agree with you. I wanted to honor somebody so it would be Dave Millard because he was the reason I have my PhD. That’s my personal little side story. So completely. I don’t mind the idea of talking to the system. I mean, we were thinking maybe calling the whole system augment. I don’t know many ideas, but I thought having the system and the voice guide being the same thing might not be a good idea, but let’s, for us for a second, just skip ahead to you’re in the middle of this and you’re looking at stuff and you speak, what can I what can I say something like that? How would we like the entity which then replies with first saying, here’s a list of comments that are relevant to what’s in front of you. But what would that entity be, do you think? I don’t know. Well, one.

Brandel Zachernuk: Way to slice it is to have different entities with different commands. You know that that means that there’s an implicit context that can be coupled together for each of them. You know, one of the reasons why we have names is because we can talk to multiple people. Yes. I jumping the queue.

Frode Hegland: No, I was saying yes. Brandalism. That’s a good example. Yes. Right, right.

Dene Grigar: We should make it, Hal.

Frode Hegland: Well, that’s why I also wanted Dave. What are you doing, Dave?

Dene Grigar: Dave’s not here. Cheech and Chong. I.

Frode Hegland: I’m sorry. Danny.

Dene Grigar: Sorry. Go ahead.

Frode Hegland: I was just going to say, Fabio, now that you’re busy, it’s your turn. But, Danny, you can take up the slack if you want.

Dene Grigar: What you’re what you’re asking for, basically is what you’re asking for is how do you initiate contact with a system like what’s that key word. And we’re we’re inculcated with the idea that it’s a name. Right. Because if I use how laughingly because that’s it comes from that. Right. And of course, Hal is evil in the end, along with Doctor Chandra. So you know, what is that first command where you get attention. Computer makes sense. System. You know something that is not even that’s not a human. So let me just say this.

Frode Hegland: You shouldn’t have to say that. That was the idea. That was the point I was making. When you’re in our world, if you speak, you’re speaking to the system. So you shouldn’t have to say the name more than you should not say it ever. Actually.

Dene Grigar: Just seems to me you should just say I need to see a menu. I mean, we’re we’re in a time of I. And, you know, GPT I don’t have to say chat gpt, you know. Yeah.

Frode Hegland: Exactly. Exactly. Yes. Yes. Sorry for the confusion there. That that that was my point. Other than if it introduces itself. And I’m not saying it needs to. Absolutely no reason to give this thing a personality beyond the actual voice. Yes. Yeah. Fabian.

Fabien Benetou: Yeah, it’s a little bit also what I mentioned earlier that to me, if it’s for the purpose of accessibility, like for example, if I’m traveling or if I’m I cannot use my keyboard or even move my hands. That’s exciting. If it’s buzz or tricking the user to invent a personality in a thing that doesn’t have one or give a false, false sense of intelligence, I don’t find that interesting, to be blunt. And overall naming in general, I think is useful based on what the thing does. So, for example, if I had here specification on that thing, whatever it is with the voice is going to do A, B, C, d, but not f, g, g, then I’m like, okay, maybe that name would make sense, maybe not. But for now, to me, it’s too early to even have a strong opinion. Except about that. For me, accessibility there would be the the one driving force let’s say. But personality naming all this or even the how do you say the tone and all these kind of things there were it’s an interesting but to me, not that yet. I think I would invest a lot of time in it. Reminds me a little bit of the last week, the debacle from OpenAI, about the similar voice with Scarlett Johansson and the her movie. I don’t feel comfortable with this. So, yeah, again, for me, accessibility and then a name that comes from usage. But before this, I don’t have a strong position.

Frode Hegland: Okay, on that note, let’s move on with the script and ignore every aspect of the character, including whether the character exists. So start. We start here in the library. For this demonstration, you will have access to the ACM hypertext proceedings shown in front of you. Just point to it and pinch your fingers to open it. And then in case that is a character, there’s a little thing here. Nothing happens for 10s. Please point to the ACM hypertext proceeding by pointing to it with your index finger, making sure that line which then extends from your fingers, lines up with the proceedings, then pinch your index finger to your thumb. This is, of course, an example of it guiding you. I don’t know if we need that. Very little left of the script. You’ll notice the library fading away and moving from you into the background. You’re now in what we call the reading room. So this is something we need to design. How to do that transition. The proceedings is now shown to you as a list of titles and of the papers it contains. Sorry, in the order they were published. And here’s a really key question to everyone. See if you agree. We expect that one of the first things you’d like to do is determine which papers are relevant to you, and which you’d like to go through first. So that is so that you’re up to speed at the conference. The idea here is to make it clear what we’ve built the system for. At least this initial interaction. To augment how you can interact with all these papers. There are many things in the reading room you can use called elements.

Frode Hegland: You can fully customize these. We have just set up a set of starting elements. The key element is who wrote the papers. So therefore we set up a list of all the authors on your left. You can select any author or authors, and you will see that the papers which are not authored by them will fade a bit, letting you focus on the ones you selected. At the top of this list of authors, you can see it says authors. This text is both the heading and the virtual envelope. You can tap on it to fold all the authors names into this, and tap on it again for them to come out. You can move any element, in this case, any author’s name, anywhere you want to, which is nice, but it can be a bit cumbersome. And this is the final bit. There are therefore also controls for what is displayed, which you can access by tapping on the sphere of your arm. This will produce two sets of options elements and layouts. Elements lets you toggle which elements are visible, and layouts lets you specify how you want to layout selected elements. So this is what I mean. Talking it through like this. This Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. So, Andrew, the point of this is for us to really find out what the interaction should be. Right. So. So for instance, the whole thing of having all the author names under the name author. So you can quickly toggle them on and off. I don’t know if that’s what we want, but by talking it out to a friend like this virtually, we may decide on what the interaction should be.

Dene Grigar: I like the idea of scripting. It helps us walk through the whole process from A to B, and helps us know what we need to design, what we don’t need to have cleans it up. It’s. I get really upset with my students that turn in a video to me that they’ve never scripted because it’s a mess, and then they have to start from scratch and reedit and reshoot and all, and there’s not even a shot list, you know? So this is a process we need to do, and that’s the scripting process. Thank you for doing this photo. I think it’d be good for us to I think you posted this is, is this what you posted in the slack channel?

Frode Hegland: No. All I posted was a reference to our meeting and the meeting this morning. I just wanted to get a feeling because I’m passionate about jumping into this. Now, this is what I’ll be doing today and tomorrow. I just wanted a Wanted to feel and it’s been extremely fruitful discussing this. So Brendel’s questions about the identity of having a male or female assistant and all that. I completely agree. I just want to read the end of the script because most of it’s nothing. The end is. Thank you for your patience. Please interact with the space and feel free to call on me any time. Just say, what can I do or help and I’ll be there. That might not be the right tone we want to set. Right. So what I’ve talked to Adam about a while ago is, you know, that in my software control click menu in gray, I have the keyboard shortcut. I think that’s really important to teach the user in our world, if we can do voice, if there is a menu of some sort, there should be written this is what you need to speak to make this happen. Right so that after so you you learn. Because what I don’t like about voice interactions is unless you’re talking to a human, you don’t know what vocabulary you could use.

Dene Grigar: Well, I think AI is changing that. I think we’re not even thinking about that anymore. We’re using natural language and sentences, and even when I type into Google for a search and I misspelled 6000 words, it still comes up. But let me just say this. Why don’t you post that in our slack channel so we have all access to it. Let us think about it before Wednesday and come back with feedback. And let me walk through this as a user, because I am the case study, right? So let me think about this in my own personal case study experience. This is what you’re saying that we’re doing. And is this exactly what I would be doing. And then this let Andrew think about this in terms of what we’ve already produced. What’s producible we can start thinking about this in terms of design, okay. Design what this needs to look like, what we’re missing going from different. Different episodes, so to speak.

Frode Hegland: Yeah.

Dene Grigar: I can’t see so small. I can’t read that.

Frode Hegland: Don’t worry about reading it. It’s not. I’m not showing you to read it. That’s that’s not the point. I will do that. But by the end of today, I will clean it up a bit. But what I’m doing is just the control click menu that I keep going back to. Today I made it a lot shorter and author because otherwise it is not useful. And that’s all I wanted to show. And Dini, the macOS reader, I’m explicitly targeting you. Because of this notion that I heard a week or two ago where the user should feel powerful, not sorry, that’s wrong. The user should feel mastery is completely different from ease of use. I just love that angle. Right? So everything I’m doing right now is purely about you, because you are a very intelligent user who’s not necessarily the same category of nerd. I am, right, so how can you come to my no, no, no mastery? You should feel that you’ve mastered it. You’ve become expert on that. Okay, okay. You say expertise.

Dene Grigar: Well, we don’t use the word mastery anymore in academia.

Frode Hegland: It’s considered look at it this way. We’re talking about tool use. Right. If you get a sword to use it. Well it’s it’s.

Brandel Zachernuk: It’s less that proto and more the political ramifications of the term mastery because of the, the the same that we don’t use blacklist. We don’t use slave and master. We don’t. They’re just things that we’ve moved on from for for important historical reasons.

Frode Hegland: I understand that I’ve learned over the last two weeks that language in America is very different from language in Europe, that there’s a lot of different things like this.

Dene Grigar: Like Colombian agrees with me, though, right, Fabian? You’re he says it sounds outdated. It is outdated.

Fabien Benetou: Yeah, I think it is, but it’s I do like it still. I guess I like some outdated stuff. The problem, I guess, is more if some people might be offended. Triggered. I don’t think it’s worth the trade off, I think so maybe it’s a bit colder, I guess, to say expertise, but at least everybody understands. I think what the what I want to highlight is the growth of expertise or the growth of mastery. If the tool helps to get become a better expert. To me that’s exciting.

Frode Hegland: But it’s not the same thing, because if we use the example of using a sword, you can have all the expertise in the world for how to use a sword, and you still won’t be able to lift it. Expertise is knowing something about something. Mastery is being an expert. It’s using something. It’s not the same thing.

Dene Grigar: Sloan is an American foundation that expected us to be diverse, and this is part of it. And I apologize for being the taskmaster on this and to keep harping on this every meeting, I apologize. I don’t want to sound like I’m bullying are the mother in the group, but I we don’t want to be using terms that are not used in an American institution because the Sloan Foundation is American. If this was this was, I don’t know, horizon, you know, in Europe or Marie Curie or something like that. Totally different. Okay. But we are bound to Sloan and I apologize for that. My, my, my country is totally ruined. Yes, I know okay, okay. This is the where I live. Okay. And there are some things. Correct.

Frode Hegland: Okay okay. Okay. Right. And this meetings, please, no more cancellation of our language. Okay. I mean, Bradley got very upset because I said an interaction was horrible. I have learned that Americans in general can see words as violence differently than at least I can. I accept that I’m not saying that we should put the word mastery into any documents and to Sloan. Right. But what I’m talking about is the general notion of someone being able to master their craft. You know, the fact that that has overtones and so on. I accept that completely. Right? I mean. Okay, right? I feel, I feel, you know, it just feels very strange to me. To the guy who used this terminology is a British legend in terms of marketing and design. And he was talking about, you know, designing taped cassette recorders quite a long time ago and how it was important you press the buttons, the user feels mastery over that. Mastery is not the same as proficiency. It really isn’t. And, you know, to kind of get. I don’t know.

Dene Grigar: No one says it’s the same as proficiency. We’re saying expertise, but I what I’m trying to say.

Frode Hegland: Sorry.

Dene Grigar: What I’m trying to say is that I can’t apologize for my country and the way we’re seeing things. We’ve had some very tumultuous decades and and hundreds of years of problematic. Just as your just as the England has at every country has had. Yeah. But we’re reckoning with we’re reckoning with it and I think it’s important that we do. I mean I used to bother me when I was called a chairman of a committee. Obviously I’m not a chairman, you know. So what do we call that thing? Why are hurricanes only women, not men? I went through this since. Since the 70s. I’m wearing 50 years. 50 years. Let me just finish. Let me just finish 50 years of this. I’ve been involved in this. Right. And things that I’ve pushed back on for myself. Just to get us to a place where we could start to think intellectually. Language is important. What we call something is important. And even as something as simple as, you know, white is good and black is bad. So black and white, negative and positive. That stuff is holds all kinds of metaphorical issues that Johnson and Lakoff talks about deeply in the Metaphors we Live by. And so I think we really do want to be careful and we can say it among ourselves, but know that we’re publishing these things, these discussions on What? Youtube. We’re putting our stuff on YouTube. So we want to make sure that people know that we, we are being careful and concerned.

Frode Hegland: All right, I understand that. Okay. But we also need we need to be a safe space for dialog. And that means obviously a balance. People should speak freely, but people should not offend. Of course, that’s the balance. My background, having grown up in Norway is obviously different. You know, the way that I interact with male, female, different races and so on. My wife and I, it baffles us. Every single American TV show has to have a racial reference in every single episode. That’s very, very strange to us in the UK. Do we have no racism? Of course we have racism. We have it in a very different level. However, you know, it is very different. Having studied and lived in America for a while, obviously you guys know better than me, but I have experienced extreme racism to my face, I. Ten second example driving at night didn’t put on my headlights. Police pull us over to say your headlights is off. Hand on the gun. Only looking at my black passenger, completely ignoring me. Many things like that. I’m fully aware right when it comes to the male female issues as well. Absolutely. Fully aware. There is also. Obviously. And by the way, I do think Denae and Andrew and Brandel, we are on the same team here. We all have the same love for humanity and each other. So I’m in no way lecturing you. Please don’t misunderstand my tone or what I’m saying.

Frode Hegland: You know there are. Many current political things that are completely ignored within the wider discussion of how we use language. You know, that’s one thing that that’s pretty weird. Yeah, I. Yeah. Okay. Now back, back a step. As far as talking to the system, I do think we need to have the system help you figure things out, because just like we have had problems with our vocabulary in terms of what we name things, the user may not know what the system has named things. So that’s why we need to have a little bit of a help system for what are those things to the left. Right. So that’s why we need to start a basic vocabulary such as those are called elements. And I’m not married to any of these examples or civil partnership to any of them. To be a bit levity. And there are some things that I’ve discussed with random people around this. One of them is the question of what can I say? You get a list, a visual list, because otherwise you have to listen forever to what are the available options. If the system is aware of what you’re looking at, that’s great. That list will be smaller. And also when you say something, you can choose to have it written out below so you can see how it’s chunked all these things we can look into over.

Speaker8: That makes sense. I think that’s.

Brandel Zachernuk: Good to be able to kind of clarify and winnow down those those things that are sort of. Relevant in the sort of domain of inquiry on the subject of vocabulary. Something that is pretty challenging to do in the process of writing dialog is realizing how bone crushingly simple speech is in comparison to writing. So saying stuff out loud and imagining other people saying it out loud is a really valuable sort of process. The words like therefore basically don’t exist in speech. They are there writing words, and people read them out, but they read them in speeches. They’re not part of casual speech that sort of flows between individuals. And like I this is the first draft, all that kind of stuff. But the second one that I would recommend and this is more, less, less critical, more recommendation is that it would be really, really great to focus on the agency, the actions that are possible within a system to be able to say, you can do this, you can do that, you can do that. And then if there are ways and this would be a sort of largely a question for Andrew of identifying and highlighting certain regions to be able to be able to create didactic language and have that kind of correspond.

Brandel Zachernuk: And then after that, rather than saying you will have or you may have noticed then sort of pulsing or, or or highlighting certain regions in order to be able to direct folks focus to the specific things such that they that you can you can maybe locate the visually locate the speech in a adjacent to those elements, but also you know, just turn all of the, all of the handles that you have to be able to kind of direct people’s attention. But don’t don’t say that you’re directing, but just but just say, this is the thing. It’s here. But yeah, like, just devastatingly simple, just embarrassingly simple. Is is the way to go with language is like language, spoken language, conversational language is more or less monosyllabic for the most part. Except for those color words that, that need to jump in on those occasional moments. But but yeah. So just explain like I’m five territory is is really valuable to be able to kind of pursue.

Frode Hegland: Two things. First of all it would be amazing if by Wednesday you can write a list of who you want to have as kind of key speakers every two weeks or themes or books. Doesn’t have to be by Wednesday, whenever. Then we can start scheduling when to tweak these things and to email. This is not up for discussion. You decide because you know what you’re talking about, so you don’t need to worry about back and forths. If, you know, if you want us to suggest to. Of course we can, but this would essentially be Denise Book Club. And I think that is really, really valuable. Is that fair enough?

Dene Grigar: Yes, I did find my audio. Okay, can we go back to what Randall just said? Because I thought, yeah, that took us completely off.

Frode Hegland: No, no, that was that was just a quick with us. Okay, back. Back to what Randall said. Andrew, don’t have a heart attack. I’m not suggesting. And no one here is suggesting that we pivot now to a primary voice interface at all. That is not what this is about, okay? This is about two things. And and Randall and Andrew, if you disagree with me, obviously say so. The first of all is writing a script as though we’re walking this through. It’s the cheapest prototyping possible. It’s just to see inconsistencies, like the whole notion of the little envelope heading that came out of writing the script. It may be wrong. Now we can discuss it. Right. That is the primary thing. Adam is really excited about. Voice. He may experiment more if we get to a point where, Andrew, you feel you can start implementing this based on what’s available. You know, we’ll do that, but it’s this is not like another ton of bricks on your head.

Andrew Thompson: Gotcha. Yeah. A voice interface is Iffy if I can get it done in time. It’s possible. Maybe, I don’t know. It wouldn’t be able to do everything that gesture could. If you’re using it for, like sending prompts for asking what words mean and stuff like that, maybe we link it up to a chat, GPT or something, and it can. It can be useful for feeding information back and forth. I could maybe see that working. Having just the sort of audio assistant giving you a tutorial that isn’t actually getting responses from the user, just kind of like, here’s a guided tour. Okay, you’re on your own. That sounds feasible. But it kind of depends on what scale we’re we’re going for in the end. Obviously, there’s a lot of other stuff you guys have asked for first, so I’m just sort of putting them in order of priority.

Frode Hegland: No. That’s perfect. And a few things on that. First of all and this is going back to what you really highlighted, Randall, when it comes to mastering words like that, I’m a pardon my French, I’m a bloody Benetton ad. Right? For me, integration of different kinds of people is absolutely crucial. So please don’t think I was trying to wave it away. And if we actually do something with a voice introduction, I will be happy. If there are several voices like you suggested that represent different things. You know, these are not something that I’m flippant about. It’s more that I was trying to get to the point of the script helping us. So please all of us, if we do add voice to this, we will not do it superficially. Right. We will think through it. We will discuss it with different kinds of people and we’ll do it right. It is just too important because there was a great article I’m sure most of you have seen. It’s of how iPads are reviewed by reviewers who hate the OS, but users love the OS. The logic of this long article is that people who use iPads often have been brought up on tablets, so that is a what they’re used to. And the limitations don’t affect them because they don’t know anything beyond which is using a computer. But the reviewers tend to be more technical and have used the computer. We cannot afford to present XR environments that feel in any way limiting to the user, and I’m going to use that word again. All types of users must be able to go into our system to feel mastery. We will find a better word. Absolutely. But the notion of the user coming in and not being patronized, nor feeling this is something for others is absolutely crucial, because so few people are working on this aspect of working in XR that even though it’s just, you know, us little guys, obviously not counting you, Brantley or Giants identity and how people fit is what this is.

Dene Grigar: I’d like to respond to that, if you don’t mind. That’s a good point. And I think the. You now watch my students in the classroom all the time with what they what they use for technology. And they’re very good at using the iPad to design, and they’re using iPhones to do things that, you know, I, I use like big computers. And I won’t get rid of this 24 inch, 27 inch Macintosh over here because I do I still use the old Photoshop and Illustrator because I can do what I need to do in a big screen, right? And I own the damn stuff. I don’t have to rent it every month. But so people know what they know, but they don’t know what’s there. And one more example is the fact that when we use our phones to actually talk to people on the phone, it breaks up. It’s a terrible experience. The phone, the iPhone, whatever phone you’re using. Android is not meant to talk on the phone. And people who didn’t grow up with landlines have no idea what it’s like to talk clearly without having to go. Can you hear me now you know. So what I’d like to think we’re doing is. Not limiting and actually informing the possibilities that exist. So that people aren’t stymied by what’s offered them. And I like the I, so I want to go and record. There’s people like me that love the macOS, that love iPads. But I also have 85 other Macintoshes and desktops that I think are just as good. Right. So I think it’s a stereotype. I think that that person. That that you were talking about is ignorant. You know, it’s not. It’s not the way all of us think. I don’t, I don’t I don’t think it’s our job to narrow people. It’s to expand. Right? We’re expanding people’s minds, blowing their minds.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, we absolutely agree on that, Danny. I think the whole notion was just, you know, what products are actually for. But in terms of what we’re doing here and Fabianski you your confetti it’s hilarious. The challenge for us is to make the system truly open, and one of them is obviously the JSON API for the visual meta or whatever, clearly open. Second thing is Fabian’s notion of lift up any component, look at what’s behind it and change it. You know, that is clearly very, very important to different levels. This morning we talked a little bit about if I open up a little box in a Fabian environment, I may not be able to deal with all the code in there, but I should at least easily find variable fields where I can change pineapple to apple if I want to, you know, to put it to my simplistic level. So to make it inclusive, that means, of course, gender, race, language. It also means mentalities and modalities. Someone’s more programmer, someone’s more visual. This is absolutely super important. Now in order to find out how to do that, we need to do all the things we discussed. And also. We. I really want to design talk. You have a document in front of you. It looks like a PDF. It’s one page. What are the interactions that you would like to be possible? But I saw a fantastic tweet today. It may be obvious, but someone from Tana said that I think about writing nodes, not documents. I personally that really appeals to me. But the more we understand about what should be possible, then we can look at how that should be possible from the framing of different perspectives. Right?

Dene Grigar: Yeah, I want the whole point of inclusivity is to, as I said here, honoring a broad range of experiences and understanding, which then goes into gender, race, you know, abilities, all these different things. But it’s also with schools you get to go to and what what part of town you live in and what your ethnic background is and what your religious practices were growing up and what you, you know, change to as you got older. It’s a whole lot of stuff. It’s not just identity in the way that it’s described narrowly. I think in many, many of the departments in the US, it’s about a whole lot of stuff.

Frode Hegland: Yes. And also key things are things that we tend to share. Like most users will have a right and a left hand, but of course many will have private primary and secondary swaps. This is one key thing that we need to to build into our system. And one of the ways I’ve thought of doing that is when you first click on the enter. Whatever hand is used at that point is recorded as being your primary hand. So you don’t have to go in and do a toggle if you’re left handed or right handed or something. Right. So there should be ways we can look at the user’s behavior to infer what works for them. Right? Yes. I mean, several people have one hand only. And, you know, question is one hand. I have a friend who was missing the hand, but has the entire arm, so they could still have the spare. Right. So where you put that as a secondary thing is important. And one thing that I’ve realized more and more is we we tend to have the grab thing in Andrew world on the left because we have the scroller on the right. But if we’re right handed, it’s more natural to reach out and grab on the right hand side of a thing, not the left hand side of a thing. So I think we’re at the stage now where we really need to look at the human body and XR space, because just the act of this, rather than going across is a bit weird. What do you think?

Dene Grigar: Yeah, that’s what we talk about in the lab all the time. And this is about this is the metadata that we’ve developed that we talked about, that we even brought into the Sloan Foundation grant. So sensory sensitivities, you know, sensory some disabilities, something as simple as left hand, right hand, right short tall I’m playing beat box. Right I mean Beat Saber. And some of the boxes come up really high for me. I’m five foot tall. I’m little, you know, I jump up and hit them. Andrew just has to reach up and and tap it. Right. So yeah, I think physical aspects are really important. Fabian.

Fabien Benetou: Yeah. And I think it’s We can we. Okay. If we if we make. I’m going to sound a little bit harsh. I guess if we make everything inclusive and accessible we’re never going to do the whole project like, it’s it’s really hard, but I think if we can have at the very least a couple of, well I guess core mechanics, ideally, for example, switching hands or one hand or even no hands, and to show that those mechanics are implemented thoughtfully that it’s flexible enough basically to accommodate I want to say different dimensions like height, maybe even more abstract one like culture, in my opinion. I would argue, because hopefully it’s well documented in open source, that with a couple of examples, then people can they can go further in other let’s say, features, or it’s at least one implementation that is flexible enough to show that we do generally support inclusivity and accessibility. Because because it’s a combinatorial problem, like if all the features have to be accessible for every kind of challenges, I think it’s intractable. But if at least a couple are done right, let’s say proper architecture with couple of good example, I would argue it’s it’s enough to say, hey, you want more and you want it differently and the system is open. So please do it, share it back with the community. And then we build on that together.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, that’s I 100% agree with that approach. And also if we do make it that level of open, it can be done. An example of how that happened last week was a user got in touch with me, said they wanted dark mode and reader they can’t have that PDFs negative often don’t look right. I realized we have a kind of a lift mode where all the text of the PDF comes up. As a word processor, we can turn that dark if the computer is in dark mode. It took me 20 minutes and I’ve solved the problem for them. You know, that’s the example of we can keep adding. Accessibility doesn’t have to all be there to begin with as well. Randall, please. Yeah.

Brandel Zachernuk: I think there’s a sort of a continuum of work in any place where you don’t have the full development budget for everything. What’s most useful to do is to show. A basic proof of concept of how certain things could be tackled, and then to and then to by demonstrating it, and then to have the ability to describe or address those things for everything beyond it. You know, like when I interview for folks in roles it’s clear that they. They can’t do everything and even if they can do lots of stuff, they shouldn’t do all of it if they want to get something done. And so what’s more important is to see what what they can do and what they say they would do with more time or more resources. And and so I think in the interest of. Yeah, like covering. The the way in which the system approaches accessibility to be able to talk about that across that that that sort of spectrum of resolution in the sense of being resolved. Is a perfectly adequate thing to do. You say, here’s one we did. Here’s a literal pencil sketch of another thing we could do, and here are some paragraphs of some other ones. And I think once you have all of those things in hand, then, then that’s, that’s done a the job. Pretty well.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. And 100%. And also we need to put our own bodies in more. That’s why it struck me with the whole right handed. I want to hold it by the right hand. You know, it’s hard to even realize that’s an issue before having been there a while. You know, it’s like what is not working for me right now. You know, that kind of stuff. And also in terms of component wise, one of the things I really hope we can do is to make it so that when you go from the library space to the reading room space, you can easily say, just take me to Andrews normal reading room or really easily say, I want to be in the Adam reading space now, and it jumps over there with some link or whatever it might be, right? Because you will need different kinds. I mean, one of the things I really want personally is to be able to read a document that is physically on my desk, as in, it’s overlaid perfectly on my desk so that I can use my finger to do highlighting and stuff like that. That’s probably not core for what Andrew’s building, but it shouldn’t be much. And then if I take my headset off, the exact same data should be available on my iPad, for instance. So that means that we look at the different media. What is the benefit of this, that and the other. Try to optimize it for that and try to make it as smooth as possible to go between them? Yes. Fabian, please.

Fabien Benetou: Going to be a little bit useless. If I were to do this, I would use the glass or phone or whatever. Take a photo of the paper itself. And either get that paper in original form, PDF or whatever, or overlay the image and then highlight on the image, not on the physical paper, because then you don’t have any jittering or anything like this. I do think a lot of people actually have that use case, and I think it’s an interesting one, bridging basically both, because if you really care about the paper, you might have printed it and then you don’t want to use the other one. That being said, I’m sorry, I have to go on to run and go. So thanks for the lovely discussion. Plenty of two challenges, not just technical ones. So we’ll get through it.

Frode Hegland: On Wednesday and see in London on Friday.

Fabien Benetou: Yes. Can’t wait.

Frode Hegland: Well, talking of which in London we are looking at having a second future of tech social this summer. So if you have any dates where you may be here towards the end of the summer, please do say so. If with a bit more planning time, we can do it. I really look forward to this weekend and wish you guys could all be here. It’ll be really interesting to have absolutely no presentation, absolutely no schedule. But if we talk real work, we hopefully we’ll put a camera on or something for some of it. So I think we made progress today. I will work on the script tonight and tomorrow morning. So at least tomorrow, if you have time, you can look at it yourself. If you have your own things you want to write in parallel, please. Please do. One more thing. And with all due respect to stereotyping, I am a man. I’m not particularly good at hearing things. I think compared to people that I know, it’s quite normal. Meaning Adam had to punch into my head last week that I had kind of ignored Deeney and Marc in terms of reading the paper. Looking into that, that was not on purpose. That was more I felt we needed to look at what I then called the map view, simply because it uses the space. I didn’t at all mean to ignore how we look at one document in different ways. But if there is something that someone feels we’re kind of not doing, you know, please don’t keep it a secret. And if you have to repeat it to me, I apologize. Sometimes I take more than once to get it.

Dene Grigar: It’s hard to speak up.

Frode Hegland: It is. And in this it’s hard.

Dene Grigar: It’s hard for a woman to speak up in a crowd like this. And we’re taught not to speak up. We’re taught not to hold the floor. And I’ve gotten to the point where I’m older and I don’t care what people think anymore. And if you call me bossy or whatever words are used for women like me, I think aggressive is another one that I hear that I can live with that. At the age of 70, it was harder. At 30 it was hard at 40, got a little easier. At 50. I started to not care at 60. And I really don’t give a damn at 70. But I’m good at what I do. I’m an expertise in a field. And there’s places I don’t. Things I don’t know. And I’m happy to learn new things all the time. So I’m excited about this project because there’s stuff I don’t know and I’m learning all the time. That’s exciting. But the things I do know, I know really well, and I get paid good money to know them. And I’d like to be able to speak up about it and not feel uncomfortable. So anything we can do to. To mitigate the stress. Here sometimes. Because I do feel stress. And I Andrew, here’s me about this. I leave out these meetings and I’m just exhausted. Because I don’t know how to speak up to this crowd without being seen as a bad person. And I keep mentioning Sloan, and I’m so tired of being the bad guy about the Sloan Foundation. But I have a responsibility and I really want us to get this project. To fruition and it’s so kick ass. It’s so cool and I appreciate being involved in it. It’s opening up doors for all of us that are involved. And yeah, I’m female, so we both have our gender issues and I also don’t see myself as straight female. I’m a little bit on the continuum. You want to be honest about it. So.

Frode Hegland: Thank you for saying that. I have a very strong mother, so I have a problem with a lot of the gender issues in the world because I cannot see them. And I acknowledge that, that I can be blind to them completely. But from many friends, I have been taught difference in this community. It is. But like any community of diverse minds forgetting everything else, it can be difficult to. To hear, especially when something is repeated because it wasn’t heard the first time. And we think it’s just a repetition. Yeah, it’s not always easy.

Dene Grigar: Well, I love everybody to death. And I’m looking forward to moving forward. And thank you, Brandon, for being here today. It’s unusual to see you on a Monday.

Brandel Zachernuk: I’ve been shooting for WWDC. It’s it’s kind of a meat grinder.

Speaker9: And so. Yeah.

Dene Grigar: Hey, so if there’s something you think we should be reading, I’d love to take suggestions. I keep pulling from the past. You know, we got Doug Rushkoff maybe coming to our symposium. Be fun to look at something Doug has said, you know, to prepare for the conference. Even so, if there’s something people want to hear or look at and review, I’m all ears. All right, everybody. Bye, Andrew. There’s no meeting today.

Speaker10: We have about.

Frode Hegland: Two two minutes left before you. I know you need five minutes to get. Let me just ask you any What other than. I mean, I think you’re getting from your side, getting better at telling me to shut up, which is good. I think I’m also getting a little better at understanding what I’m talking over you. In addition to that, is there anything that I or we can do to make this more pleasant? Because these meetings have to be pleasant if we’re going to be successful, of course, there will be a lot of hard discussions and disagreements, but we must leave them feeling nice. What can improve?

Dene Grigar: Well, I think it’s interesting that you mentioned that Adam was talking about how you we didn’t talk much about the paper with Mark and I, and I always love it when I’m championed by people, but I get tired that I’m having to be championed by my colleagues. And I want to say this I’ll say something and it gets maybe washed under, and then I will hear Adam say, hey, that’s a good idea. And then you you like it? This happens. If I know if Adam, Brandel, Fabian are lay on like something, I know it’s going to fly. I don’t have their support. One of them, if not more of them. I know that whatever I just suggested is not going to fly at all. And I just want to put that out there and that that is true. So when Brandel says yes, I’m like, yes, he he’s going to listen to me. And that, that that’s that makes me uncomfortable.

Frode Hegland: So that is a I think that dates to a very important point, which is I think it is very, very important to praise people. If we like something someone has said or done, it is not an interruption. It is really important to say it because we need to feel what works right. It’s easy to say, oh, I don’t agree, you know, in different communities because. But what does that do? It gives us a little bit of armor, right? So let’s say Randall has said to me a couple of times that, oh my God, this aspect of visual meta is brilliant, or this is nice or I approve or whatever. If he then says this bit just doesn’t make any sense.

Speaker10: It.

Frode Hegland: There is an equation in there. There’s like, hang on, here’s someone who cares. What do you mean? But it’s very easy because we’re online and we’re many people to only say, oh, it’s only important to criticize, so to speak. I guess that makes sense, right?

Dene Grigar: Nothing. It’s hard to I mean, I think in these, this kind of situations, a hard communication method. I mean, we’ve been teaching in it for what, since 2020? Hard, hard, hard core. But before that even and it’s hard to do online. Face to face is so much easier. I can’t see your entire body. I can’t really see your face closely to see your. Your your responses. It’s hard. And I do. I try really hard verbally to say to Mark because I think Mark is brilliant and I tell him all the time in slack, you’re so smart. Thank you for doing this. Thank you. Acknowledging him all the time, because I think he needs that. We all need that. I tell I tell Andrew. How much I adore him and how brilliant he is. Right? So I think it’s important that we say these things to people, and we do this in the lab all the time. In our lab. So. And even if you don’t agree with something, just say, that’s an interesting idea. Let’s talk about that. What do other people think? And to and to give credence to lease it a possibility. That idea it’s just some basic. Ways to communicate in this environment, which I think is going to be different than this weekend when you’re all together. It’s going to be fun. We’re going to get very drunk.

Dene Grigar: Well. Okay, well that too, but whatever. All right. So thank you everybody. Andrew, there is no lab meeting today. You are free to play and the weather is going to be lovely. So enjoy.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, it’s all good.

Dene Grigar: And I can’t wait to see the script. And thank you for doing that. Order. That’s a good thing.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. It’s hopefully something we can argue around. You know, so at least we can see something concrete. Say we do that and that’s that’s useful.

Dene Grigar: Well, I think we’re going to act it out on on Wednesday in the lab. Well, I will act out the whole thing step by step, so we may not have a complete answer to you for you on Wednesday at the meeting. But certainly following that, when Andrew and I were together walking through it. That’ll be helpful.

Speaker10: Yeah.

Frode Hegland: No, it’s It’s an exciting time.

Speaker10: Any pointing at things.

Brandel Zachernuk: Andrew? I just very quick thing. I don’t know if you’ve played Andrew with with the outline and the outline feather or outline blur in troika. But it’s a really great way of making something literally glow. And you can animate those things to be able to pull those, those things up. I use it for shadows, but you can also use it for glowing. And so it in order to be able to pulse and, and draw attention to things, then it could be a pretty effective technique.

Andrew Thompson: That’s a cool idea. Yeah. I’ve messed with the outline. Not so much the blur. The outline lags rather aggressively if you use it too much. But say, like, putting it on just a period for, like, a glowing dot. That’s a great idea.

Frode Hegland: These are the things we need to discuss. Thank you.

Speaker10: All right.

Frode Hegland: See you all on Wednesday. Bye for now.

Dene Grigar: Bye. Thank you everybody.

Speaker10: Bye.

Chat Log:

15:59:34 From read.ai meeting notes : Frode added read.ai meeting notes to the meeting.

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16:17:50 From Andrew Thompson : Fabien is totally correct: small bits of ‘redo’ are absolutely important and happen all the time. I was talking about large scale things, like how we removed physical pinch functionality and designed the space so it is no longer within arm’s reach, then recently talked about adding it back in (which would end up needing a fundamental design change and would scrap lots of progress)

16:18:01 From Dene Grigar : Reacted to “Fabien is totally co…” with 👍

16:18:30 From Dene Grigar : Andrew, do you have a copy of the video you made the HT 23, the looping video????

16:19:42 From Dene Grigar : Shall we shorten the Monday FoT meeting to an hour?

16:20:23 From Andrew Thompson : Replying to “Andrew, do you have …”

I can’t remember specifically which video you are talking about. Is it an animated video or one we recorded in Rome?

16:24:11 From Frode Hegland : Summary is up on Slack of course

16:28:04 From Frode Hegland : Friday was technical no?

16:29:00 From Frode Hegland : Design should be inclusive though

16:29:24 From Andrew Thompson : Right, Friday was intended to be technical but often switched over to design as well.

16:30:24 From Dene Grigar : I thought we were not using the Chat, Frode

16:46:08 From Frode Hegland : Monthly Monday Book Club

16:46:31 From Frode Hegland : Bi-Weekly

16:47:38 From Frode Hegland : 🙂

16:52:17 From Frode Hegland : So we do both: Every other meetings we have split meetings

17:07:53 From Dene Grigar : I need to get some water

17:08:57 From Dene Grigar : Hal

17:12:52 From Dene Grigar : I don’t want to personify a system, frankly.

17:14:11 From Fabien Benetou : Reacted to “I don’t want to p…” with 👌

17:14:42 From Andrew Thompson : We’d want to workshop that script a little since that isn’t quite the interaction we have. Totally fine for now as a concept.

17:14:52 From Dene Grigar : Reacted to “We’d want to worksho…” with 👍

17:16:49 From Andrew Thompson : I’m talking about the pointing with the finger specifically, but yes

17:16:49 From Dene Grigar : I like the idea of scripting the activity. We do this when making a video

17:17:38 From Fabien Benetou : scripting, storyboarding, a lot of steps before code then tests

17:17:45 From Dene Grigar : yes

17:20:35 From Dene Grigar : expertise rather than mastery

17:21:14 From Fabien Benetou : I do like mastery but indeed can sound outdated

17:22:29 From Andrew Thompson : proficiency is also a term often thrown around, though I suppose that’s to a lower level than expertise.

17:23:00 From Fabien Benetou : we’d have other challenges, no worries there

17:30:27 From Fabien Benetou : multimodal hints

17:30:40 From Dene Grigar : Reacted to “multimodal hints” with 👏

17:34:38 From Fabien Benetou : actually trivial, definitely safest way

17:39:31 From Dene Grigar : the point of inclusivity is actually about honoring a broad range of experiences and understandings

17:40:47 From Fabien Benetou : or 1 hand only