Bob Stein & Frode Hegland on Tapestry & AI
Frode Hegland: Hey, Bob.
Bob Stein: Hi. I’m not on my ideal machine. I’m trying to figure out where the zoom window went.
Frode Hegland: Yeah, that happens so often. They just change things slightly, and it just goes. Yeah. It’s weird.
Bob Stein: Okay. Window. Zoom meeting. There we go. Maybe that’s it. There we go. Can you see me? Yeah, yeah.
Frode Hegland: I can see your face. Absolutely.
Bob Stein: Oh, I see okay. Good morning.
Frode Hegland: Good morning, good morning. I have the wrong thing plugged in here. I’ve started using a proper microphone, and I’m not really in the flow of it yet, but it makes a big difference to the recording. Yep. You’re okay to record this session, obviously, right?
Bob Stein: Of course. Go away. What’s the okay for? There we go. Before everything crashes, let me share my screen and show you some stuff. Yes, we can talk during it or after it. Okay. Share screen is now here. And entire screen share.
Frode Hegland: Yep. That’s good.
Bob Stein: And then let me go to Safari. And let me go here and let me go here. How do I move this sucker out of the way. There we go. And let’s get this out of the way. So. The big, big difference between what you saw in the past and what you’re seeing now is how easy it is to make these things. I will actually, unlike all past demos, at the end of this, I will actually make something. And I’ve just been having a ball putting things together the and I, I’ve been trying to figure out the exactly right way to say this to people, because if I show this to somebody who’s a programmer, they’ll look at this and they’ll say, well, what you’ve got here is you have a bunch of text boxes and you have some images and you have some video. I could put that up in a few minutes, you know, using whatever HTML code I’m Code I’m using. And my answer is yes, you could, but I couldn’t. But for me to be able to assemble something like this, you know, in, I don’t know, 15, 20 minutes is and which includes, you know, some of the writing and everything else is just phenomenal. And yes, I know there are programs like Miro and Prezi and Obsidian that will do some of this, but a they’re not as flexible as tapestries and also tapestries are free. So I’m not going to push our buttons because I’m accepting a couple of cases. This is one of the old tapestries sort of remade of the nine versions of a African folktale. And, you know, you can, you know, zoom in easily here on Here on these things, and they work really sweetly.
Bob Stein: And let’s go to this one. You’ll like this one. So. Basically, after Zuckerberg’s announcement the other day, it started making me think of the way that all the industrialists in Germany caved to Hitler and the Third Reich. Reich. So I asked these six different metas. I did six different eyes about the role of German industrialists. And then I asked the question. Can you draw any parallels to today, especially the roles of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg in relationship to the Trump presidency? And interestingly Claude and the two Googles completely chickened out. The. Wait, where’s this one? I apologize, I need to be careful about drawing historical parallels, and it says nothing. And but what’s amazing here is that meta answers that question in the following way. The parallels are striking. Musk and Zuckerberg seem to be taking a page from the playbook of German industrialists who supported Hitler’s rise to power. Et cetera. Et cetera. I was shocked to see meta say something like that. And interestingly, perplexity and Microsoft’s Bing eyes, they all basically answer it substantively also. This is a remake of the original tapestry, the very first one we ever made. But that one it was it has Alan Keyes. It broke up. Alan Keyes talk at the Vannevar Bush Symposium into chapters. But in the original, we had to go to a different page for each one of the each one of his discussions of the pioneers. And here it’s all on one page, which is pretty fantastic. And although I can’t do it today, we’ll be able to click on a given chapter, as it were, and bring all of it forward at once.
Frode Hegland: A question on this. Yeah. First of all, what size monitor are you using right now?
Bob Stein: I’m just using a MacBook Pro.
Frode Hegland: So is it a 14 or 16?
Bob Stein: No, it’s not a pro. Sorry. It’s a MacBook air. It’s a 15 inch MacBook air. At maximum resolution.
Frode Hegland: Okay, that’s very useful because obviously. Well, right now I’m at home. So I’m looking at it on the 27 inch, which is very pleasant for this type of large view. And of course in an XR environment it could be any size you want. So yeah. Thank you.
Bob Stein: Right. I mean I can change the. Obviously the zoom right now it’s a plus and minus of 30. We’re changing it to a what do you call it, a slider. So it’ll be exact. Right? This is just something I made because I like her work so much, you know, and it took ten minutes to get these
Frode Hegland: So brilliant. I agree with you.
Bob Stein: She’s fantastic. Yeah. This was the first time I. I decided to ask a bunch of A’s a question, and it it it’s fun to lay out, but what was interesting here was that I I put in some comments here, just notes that I thought were interesting, and I sent it to one of our programmers, and we ended up having a conversation where we would just make a new text box and and start typing in it, and it, it the I explained to him that it was starting to look quite Talmudic and he didn’t know what that meant. So I, of course, got a picture of a Talmud for him. I don’t think this is a good model for if you’re going to have 20 people in a conversation, this would get way out of hand, but for 2 or 3 people, it’s really interesting compared to a threaded conversation, to be able to sort of go into the exact place you want and draw a line from one to the next. And there’s no reason why the lines couldn’t be driven down. I’m not sure I’ll get this right. I’m not going to. I think I would need to zoom in to make this really work properly. No. Anyway, this. We’re still, you know, this is not. We’re not ready for prime time yet. This is just the old basic demo teacher describes an exercise. There’s a instruction manual, and this is, you know, basic is running in here. The. This is a new piece. The the emulator is working brilliantly okay I if I, if I launch the The hitchhiker’s Guide in here it’s slow but the it runs 100% of the of the functionality of the original book from 1992.
Frode Hegland: That’s amazing.
Bob Stein: And it it I can’t it’s so interesting when I, when I made this the other day, I realized that there we go. I realized the other day that when we talked about expanded books, it wasn’t just the originals, you know, like the simple sort of Recreation of a of a of a printed book. But we went further and we started doing things that were much more complex. And it was cool to be able to put, you know, the Macbeth running in the emulator and videos of mouse. And the flexibility here was remarkable. And let me see. That one’s not going to show. Okay. So. Let me create a new one and let me get out of full screen mode. And Expanded books. So this is a folder that I have. And okay, so this is a folder that I have of things in it. Some of the still pictures and PDFs from that. The last tapestry I showed you, if I just open that, select everything, drag it to the tapestry. It brings everything in. And. I can just make a grid to make it simpler, to sort of see what I’ve got.
Frode Hegland: That is really, really important that you don’t have to. Sorry. Every item around manually.
Bob Stein: There we go. And then I can put them where I want and. This. This grab handle isn’t at all optimized yet. Come on, Bob, you can do it. I know you can.
Frode Hegland: These things are so often fiddly, no matter what you do.
Bob Stein: Yeah, but anyway, I can resize things and to bring in a video. And then, you know, the nice thing is I can take these items and just bring these around. And. Here’s a video. If I just copy that and go back to the tapestry and paste it, it brings in the video. Which I can then place where I want. Again, you know it. It’s the to be able to work that intuitively and not writing any code and having everything be either just sort of dragged in or copy and pasted in is pretty fantastic.
Frode Hegland: Yeah, it really is.
Bob Stein: I don’t know if this will work. Let me see if it’ll work in Chrome. Where is Chrome? Oh, I don’t have chrome on this machine anymore. Let me try this. I go to tapestries. And. Let’s try this one. Create new. Anyway let me stop the share. So I’m hoping that sometime in the next month we’ll be able to start letting people work on this, and, you know, it. There’s, there’s there’s a bunch of little UI problems and a couple of memory issues, but we’re we’re trying to keep version 1.0 really lean, and I think we’ll get there.
Frode Hegland: Yeah. Lean is hard. It’s always easy to add another feature that just makes it more complicated. Lean is not easy, so good luck with that.
Bob Stein: Well, I’ve I’ve been in this war a lot of times for I. I’ve learned my lesson.
Frode Hegland: Yeah. Yeah.
Bob Stein: He And it’s And also, the more that I work with it, the more I realize what we have is absolutely enough for now. The I mean, yesterday I had occasion. We I have a little Mac mini, and I was thinking of doing this demo for you on that, but. But the Apple store doesn’t open till for an hour, and I don’t have a track pad for it, and I could use a track pad right now. And so but I noticed that when I put it. Oh, I know which one. I didn’t get to show you. One of my favorites. The that when the track when the when it’s on a my big LG wall monitor that I use for with the Mac mini for showing TV that I suddenly realized, Holy shit, this is going to be amazing for teachers in a classroom because they’re going to have all that stuff there, and all they’re going to have to do is point at something to bring it up on the screen. There’s no, you know, they’re not going to go in with a bunch of links. They’re going to go in with everything there, and it’s going to make their lectures flow so much more smoothly and beautifully than they can now.
Frode Hegland: So for context, let me just briefly tell you what we’re discussing at the lab at the moment. Great. We’re trying to figure out what the document format for XR should be, and it’s become a really big and difficult issue, because we don’t want to have an environment where you put on a headset and you do all kinds of cool stuff, and it’s kind of a database and it’s kind of gone from you and it’s kind of dead. It has to be in a way that you can take it between your traditional computer and the on the headset, which is where you come in. So what you have is kind of an advanced knowledge map, kind of a display. Exactly right. So that should be possible for you to continue working with on your computer and put on a headset. And it’s all there in an XLR formatted way, so that you could literally use an entire wall for your display, or many walls, or float in space or whatever you want. Right? Yep. So then the question becomes, how does the user own this? You know, is it going to be saved as a PDF? Probably not. But even if it’s in an HTML or JSON, which is more likely then what. Right. Kind of at the end of the day, what is the it.
Bob Stein: Is a format. It, it I mean, one of the things I don’t know, if you remember in the demo that I did with the prototype, the last thing I did was take a tapestry and paste it into a WordPress blog. Because in my mind, what we’re creating is exactly the sort of digital era analog of a of a PDF. Pdfs were made to bring print with us. Tapestries are made to bring complex multimedia documents with us.
Frode Hegland: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, but but I’m just saying that this is an ongoing discussion because one of the issues is adine, you know, Dean. Of course, of course. Yeah. You know, she’s very theatrical, very larger than life person. And she mentioned a year ago that she wants to be in a room with her headset, reading stuff and being able to tear things off, put it here, put it there and all over the place. And in the beginning that was technically a bit intimidating. But I do agree that that is a very, very important ambition. So that means we also now need to define this thing that is turned off. First of all, taken off. Turn off. What do we call it? Currently the language we’re using is lifted. And the lifted piece in an XR space. Who owns it? Is it owned by the original document? The software, the room, the environment? The operating system? The user? The authoring environment? These are really difficult questions that we’re playing with. Our current stance is that what is lifted is basically a citation or a quote. So it has knowledge of where it came from and where it is in space. Right?
Bob Stein: Yep.
Frode Hegland: So that then gets very interesting because of what you’re building. I would very much like to be able to go into the tapestry and do stuff. Select items. Copy them somehow. Go into what we’re building in the lab. Paste them and they are pasted with some sort of provenance and intelligence.
Bob Stein: Yep. I don’t see why not.
Frode Hegland: So that’s that’s that’s going to be a user interface challenge more than a technical challenge, because I also have the same issue that you have with programmers. You know, you talk to them and it’s very much. Yeah. But yeah, but I can do this. Yeah. But yeah, but it’s like enough of the. Yeah. But yeah, but you know it’s the manner how it’s done is kind of important.
Bob Stein: Well and and I will and and I’ve started to say to them, you know when they say that I say yes, but you didn’t because you didn’t understand why the rest of us might want it. And that that often shuts them up.
Frode Hegland: You know the story of the Columbus egg?
Bob Stein: No.
Frode Hegland: Well, apparently, when Columbus came back from America. I’m not saying it’s a true story at all, but a lot of people were saying you just got in a boat and went to the other side of the world. I could have done that. So he gets kind of annoyed, and he takes an egg, a raw egg, and he says, okay, anybody who can make this egg stand on the table without falling over narrow side down. If you can do that, I’ll shut up. People try all kinds of things. Obviously, they’re not allowed to lean it or use salt as a base. Nothing like that. So finally the egg comes back to Columbus, who takes the egg and he smashes it onto the table. It cracks, goes everywhere, but it’s upright. And somebody says, I could have done that. And he says exactly what you said. Well, yes, but you didn’t.
Bob Stein: Excellent.
Frode Hegland: I love that story.
Bob Stein: It is a good story. Can I let me show you one more thing, because I. It has such a beautiful resonance with the past. One more.
Frode Hegland: Thing. Yeah. Yes!
Bob Stein: Yeah. Yeah.
Frode Hegland: Yes.
Bob Stein: Yeah. Share. So. This This is from 1981, and it’s a it’s a father. It’s it’s it was a scenario we described of a how the future encyclopedia would, would be used. And so what you have here is a flat, flat television screen on the wall. And it’s a father giving his son a tour of 1960s rock and roll. And this is a tapestry made from this fantastic video disc we had. And it’s I. It’s 15 music videos. These are pretty fantastic. These were made in the 70s before MTV. Let me zoom in on one of these. And. What? I didn’t realize this until last night when I was showing it to somebody, but that we actually had. Because I put it up on the big screen TV, and I was giving some younger friends who were here who knew none of this, this history of the of of the music or of the video that’s in it. And I realized that I was exactly doing What? This what this father was doing with the flat screen television. And this was a good 20 years before we had flat screen televisions, or obviously before. We have what we have now. And I’m discovering all kinds of resonances with sort of past goals that we had that were, are suddenly now possible.
Frode Hegland: Yeah. That’s amazing. Isn’t that the best feeling in the world?
Bob Stein: Yeah. Especially when you’re as old as I am and you realize you’ve been consistently you know, you’ve been on a you’ve been on a through path for all for 40 years.
Frode Hegland: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No. Exactly. And isn’t it also weird when it comes down to the simplest things? The absolutely simplest things?
Bob Stein: Yeah. Well, that means probably you’re in the right place.
Frode Hegland: Yeah. It’s the most amazing feeling. And it it is really important that we have the community of us. Because when you work on simple, simple things to make things simpler and more powerful, not a lot of people get it. You know, they just don’t.
Bob Stein: Yeah. I can’t wait to show this to Vince. I mean, he because he was such a proponent of the early version, he’s going to really love where we’ve gotten to.
Frode Hegland: Yeah, I definitely think he will.
Bob Stein: Yeah.
Frode Hegland: And you know, he’s a very, very big supporter of the kind of work that you’re doing. And his level of interest though is very different. Like he doesn’t do a lot of keyboard shortcuts. So I’ve redesigned a lot of reader and author to appeal to him as a just, you know, someone who’s really, really clever, but not necessarily the kind of power user that I am. So the use of context. Menu. Oh my God. I go back and forth between reader and author. Removing and removing. And hang on. We need this. So it goes up and it’s like, does that really communicate what it is? We have to add a word. No, that’s too many. You know what I mean? It’s like constant trying to whittle it down to the knife to cut through it all.
Bob Stein: Yep.
Frode Hegland: So yeah. No, that’s that’s good, that’s good.
Bob Stein: And I think that certainly by the third week, by, by the last week of January, I’ll feel comfortable showing this to a larger group of people.
Frode Hegland: Okay.
Bob Stein: And then the goal is in, in February to let people start to have it. I need to develop need to write some. I mean, the big problem, right? Not a problem. We don’t have a server yet. So right now these things have to be on local on your machine.
Frode Hegland: But server you’re welcome to just completely do whatever you want I have a full machine at a company called Liquid Web, which is such a cool name, of course.
Bob Stein: I think I think the guys in Bulgaria are going to do it. I mean, obviously it’s not, obviously, but this is going to be the Internet Archive eventually, but we don’t want to be on their schedule for people, beta users, you know, take them. How many, who knows how many weeks or months to, to actually make it. And partially because Brewster, he’s very cautious now because they got their the attack on the technical attack on the archive was so deep and so severe that. Anyway thank you for the time, bro. I really really wanted to show it to you.
Frode Hegland: It’s really inspirational. I’m trying. Actually. Can I show you two things that I’m working on?
Bob Stein: Of course.
Frode Hegland: Okay. Thank you. There’s one thing that’s literally new today, but I think you. You’re the man for this, so. And please, look at this in a very selfish way. Because of your brilliance in a way of how it fits your world. Okay, so just briefly here to begin with, this is just an author window, and it’s a journal. So I just write down the dates. And then what happened that day, I found it to be very useful for two reasons. One, I can now link to other documents. So if I write too much in my journal, I kind of put it on document and link to it. So that’s kind of nice. But also I have this feature called Mark, which all it does is make the text orange and bold.
Bob Stein: Nice.
Frode Hegland: I usually use that for action items. So the thing I hate about paper not journals, you write something and it’s there’s an action item and you forget to do it, right?
Bob Stein: Right.
Frode Hegland: So here, if I now fold it into an outline, anything that is orange stands out in the outline. So then you know, oh, I have to do this. And once I’ve done it I control click and choose Mark again and it goes away.
Bob Stein: Sweet.
Frode Hegland: So that’s the that’s the.
Bob Stein: Just for fun. It is. Is there a URL that goes with what I’m looking at?
Frode Hegland: No. This is some of this is available in author. Some of it isn’t as in the release version.
Bob Stein: I was just wondering if we could if if I could put a an operation operational author.
Frode Hegland: Hang on the door. One second. Delivery. I’m not sure whether or not just leaving it. I have a vague feeling I know what you’re going to say, so I’m quite excited. So go ahead and say it, please.
Bob Stein: Well, I just want to see if I can get author put put author into a tapestry.
Frode Hegland: Author documents are they’re called Doc Liquid. Hang on. I’m just going to And the thing about that is, if you do show package contents, they have a lot of jsons.
Frode Hegland: The jsons is the map view here. So that’s probably something that we should be able to make compatible with to jump between our systems. But the key brief thing to show you today is actually AI related.
Bob Stein: Okay.
Frode Hegland: Great. You and me are similar AI skeptics, but also accepting that people use it. So we have to make it more useful. So the first thing is.
Bob Stein: This I’m not an AR skeptic okay. Oh, AR skeptic. Sorry, I thought you said AI skeptic.
Frode Hegland: Yeah. No, no, I.
Bob Stein: Said I’m not an AI skeptic.
Frode Hegland: I think okay, well, I think you and I are the same as in it can be abused, but we got to use it.
Bob Stein: So absolutely, it can be. It can be abused, but what can’t?
Frode Hegland: Exactly. So while you’re writing that, because the whole point of author and reader is to help you think, not to think on your behalf, obviously, you know, that’s one of the areas we connect. So in this prompt spark, which has a long prompt that basically says, I need to be inspired to write something next. This is what I’ve written. What might you suggest? So it goes through things like. First a summary to make sure you have written what you think. You’ve written. Then it goes through all kinds of weird things, from origami to synesthesia. This is random to see how it relates. And then at the end it goes through your own interest. Right? Because an author now, not only do you write your own prompts that you can then instantly apply. You can also tell the system who you are, what you’re interested in, what your field of interest is.
Bob Stein: Fabulous. What what, what are. But how are you? What are you attached to? Chatgpt and. How does that work in the real world in terms of does the person who’s using it have to have a they tie it to their ChatGPT account?
Frode Hegland: No, that’s not allowed by Apple because an apple doesn’t make money. So currently I give gave it to them for free. A limited amount of queries per day. I’m planning to make it a subscription with an author, because it would be best for everybody if you use your own key, but Apple doesn’t allow it. But so this is for writing. But this is the entirely new thing today, which is while you’re reading. Because the challenge is, and this is where I’m hoping you and me can integrate. The challenge is, if you ask this to summarize and tell you what it is, it’s doing the thinking for you, right? So let’s just do this. We do ask AI, and this is now based on somebody who has a technology and hypertext background. They’ve entered that in the settings. So it goes through and it gives. A little bit of a summary. But then it takes the keywords which are relevant to that user, not just generic keywords from the document. So for instance here the user has said I know technology and stuff, but I don’t really know social stuff. Tell me about the social stuff. And what’s interesting about this approach is, first of all, here’s a general one. And here are, because I’m testing, it’s not as elegant as it could be, but there’s also things like timeline. It extracts it so well if there’s any time related information. So I’m thinking that’s probably something you could easily integrate it into your tapestry. As in you have a tapestry. There is time information. By the way over here is a timeline automatically created for it.
Bob Stein: It’s very interesting because we have been talking about the problem of not problem. We want to give people the ability inside of a tapestry to query an AI because of 100 different things, you know, you know, you take, You can imagine a tapestry with lots of content to it. Oh, I mean, where did I didn’t show the encyclopedia one? But, you know, that has a thousand pages of of really interesting documentation and documents in it. You might very well want a, an AI to summarize it and to, you know, what would how would X summarize this versus how would Y summarize it? Your timeline example is a good one. But we we’ve been stymied on the problem of how do you actually get an AI into a tapestry. I think we’ve solved within liquid. But that because liquid is a is an Apple app.
Frode Hegland: Yeah, yeah, it’s I have partly solved it, I think by doing the free writing of prompts. That’s the first thing. So you apply a prompt that is pre-written so you don’t have to write the question every time. That’s really important. And the second thing is and that’s the new thing you tell it about yourself because an author, you have this journal, you also have a document for ideas that you just write down. So what I want in the future is for if the user wants it, it automatically goes into your ideas document and uses that as part of the prompt because it then it knows more about you, right?
Bob Stein: I mean, yeah, theoretically you could give it access to your Gmail account, right? And it could read all your mails if you, if you let it.
Frode Hegland: Yeah, you could do a lot of that. But I think that the challenge is for people like us.
Bob Stein: I love the ideas document. I think that’s great. People like you and I would fill it out. You know, I’m
Frode Hegland: It is a. Yeah, it is a little bit of an interface challenge to make sure that people want to fill it out because, like, the extraction of the, by the way, just to on the side, the timeline that you saw, I also have a prompt for people. So once you start building up a few of those and they’re relatively robust, then the user should be able to design their AI experience or whatever you call it. So you can say, if I ask for an overview, include a timeline or not, almost like checkboxes. So I can imagine with the tapestry, which is so aligned with the work we’re doing on on mapping with author, you know, you have a headset on and you have designed the rooms like you have your tapestry in front of you, but you’ve decided on the right people. On the left is a timeline. So if So if anything, it’s automatically there on the timeline so you can see it in context, etc..
Bob Stein: Well also we should be able to from liquid take a liquid document then and say make a tapestry out of this. In other words extract if the if the if the tapestry mentions, you know, seven famous computer scientists, at the very, very least, it should be able to go and get the Wikipedia page for all those automatically and build the tapestry.
Frode Hegland: Yes, I just did this now. Just clicking about. There’s a paper called Storytelling Machines and I asked it to extract the names. And what I’ve asked it for in this example is only use information in the paper. I don’t want you to guess who this person is and get the, you know, someone else. Also at the bottom here it’s a bit tiny, but you can click to save the metadata as an appendix to the document. What you’re saying is more interesting. Use this to find Wikipedia articles and display it in more interesting ways. I mean, like a lot of this, let’s say if I can find a picture of this person I don’t know if that’s useful, but does that person have a Wikipedia article? No.
Bob Stein: I mean, I, I think that. You know, at the very you could say if there’s a we put a we take the three most linked to or looked at objects related to this person from the web, you know, their, their personal page, their Wikipedia page. You know, the paper that’s been that they’ve written, that’s been referred to the most times. I mean, it it’s it becomes an advanced search tool that can then automatically generate a tapestry which gets pretty interesting.
Frode Hegland: I completely agree with you and just want to show the the overview again, I call it I overview to make it clear. I find it so useful. There was a paper circulating in our community recently about how reading on paper is apparently better than reading on screens. When I read that paper, there were so many technical terms I didn’t understand. One was N400. When I did a search on it, I found tax information, but when I asked it to do it here, it explained that concept in relation to that work, which was actually useful. And, you know, this is why we’re now I’m now trying to see if we can customize it. It’s actually quite tricky. The way to put the the text in. So now, for instance, I asked someone who has a biology background, but they want to learn about technology and hypertext. Suddenly there’s a lot more things to explain. Like a guy would be annoying if you and me had to see the definition of a guy, right? That this person needs it. And let’s do the opposite. Here’s someone with a technology background. Let’s see what they get. Okay, let’s change the formatting. But it’s got a few things pedagogy, emerging structure, things that aren’t necessarily theirs. Right. So yeah I think that we’re sitting in an incredible time, obviously with AI, but the challenge of AI is still the interaction. And that’s what you’re working on.
Bob Stein: Yeah. I mean, by the way, about AI and being skeptic or not, I think I will probably be the end of the human species, but for what you and I are doing right now, it’s really interesting. And whereas we’re not we’re not coming up with you know, super intelligence, we’re just using it to enhance our abilities. You know, the old Alan Kay, you know, amplify human abilities. Ai itself is going to go somewhere dangerous. Probably. But we’re it’s fun for you and me because we’re not playing around with the danger zone.
Frode Hegland: I kind of agree about that fear, but I can’t afford to go there too much because of Edgar. I want, you know, to be positive for him. However, I really do believe there is something almost God given about AI and XR happening at the same time. I really do think that having more ways to view information is the only way we can get a get a grasp onto the I.
Bob Stein: No question, no question. Would you send me the link to the video of this? I both want to. I want to show I want to show the actual demo to my colleagues. But also, I really want to dig into what you’re saying about the AI stuff, because AI being able to link what you’re doing with what we’re doing, I think, is is a very rich vein to, to explore.
Frode Hegland: Well, absolutely. I’ll do.
Bob Stein: That in summary.
Frode Hegland: As well.
Bob Stein: How was the swim?
Speaker3: Good.
Bob Stein: How was your swim?
Speaker3: Good.
Bob Stein: Good.
Frode Hegland: Yes. His. His brain has grown so much over the holiday that I’m wondering if his skull is about to crack. Yeah. And badminton. How was the badminton? Excellent.
Bob Stein: Oh, he was swimming, not badminton. Sorry.
Frode Hegland: Both.
Speaker3: Just one hand and I still won.
Frode Hegland: Oh, cool. Yeah, I know, it’s amazing. Edgar! Come back. I want to say something to Bob about what you’re doing right now. Please. This is fascinating and relevant. So we went to Japan last.
Speaker3: Can I get.
Frode Hegland: Yeah, yeah, get the figure. So we got these kits, this Gundam kits, right? Yep. And it is, you know, like. Yep. And one thing that I learned in Norway from a family member who is well, friend who is a teacher, pointing out that in schools now, they don’t do, you know, woodwork or sculpting, which is crazy. So the three dimensional learning isn’t there. When Edgar bought this a year ago for Easter, he had to have Mommy or daddy help him all the time to time to do it. Now he’ll sit down, do it himself, complain a bit, get on with it, and it’s done. So these physical, three dimensional structures. How can our educational systems not value them? So what you’ve done.
Bob Stein: Oh, nice. That’s elegant.
Frode Hegland: By himself. He. He asked me for one thing, and I said no, but he asked me for one thing. I said, okay, I’m going to get you a coffee. That’s what I call it when I give him an ice cream, because he gets the coffee when I have ice cream anyway. So yeah, very relevant. We need to understand spatiality with computing more. We need to understand the AI. You mentioned Alan Kay. He has said he wants to he wants to try the Apple Vision Pro. But of course he’s not doing that.
Speaker3: Well cool I got it having wings and.
Frode Hegland: I got I got to finish my conversation with uncle Bob.
Bob Stein: I saw Alan two Alan two months ago in London.
Frode Hegland: How was he?
Bob Stein: He’s much better. I mean, he’s not imminently dying of cancer. He seems to be in remission at the moment.
Frode Hegland: Very good.
Bob Stein: You know, I don’t think he’s. I don’t think he’s very active, you know, in. But he’s he’s building a new organ to play in his flat. And anyway, he’s.
Frode Hegland: I’m just emailing him now.
Bob Stein: I’m sorry. You just did what?
Frode Hegland: I’m just emailing him now, and I’m saying hope you’re doing well. Bob Stein said you look so well. Would you like a session with the Apple QC? He has asked me to keep bugging him about this as his energy comes and goes. So it’ll be fun to to get his reaction.
Bob Stein: Yeah, I think he’ll like it. Anyway, I, I actually have to go now.
Frode Hegland: That’s absolutely fine. I will send.
Bob Stein: That’s what you’re doing is I mean, it’s really coming along beautifully. I think I’m going to have to start to experiment with it now with liquid the I mean, the inclusion of the AI in it makes it very exciting and compelling for me.
Frode Hegland: Yeah, it does, but we need to find out how we can combine what we do because.
Bob Stein: Oh, we will. I think that’s yeah. The. And do send me in as first step. Do send me the link to the today’s video. Okay.
Frode Hegland: Absolutely. I’ll send you a summary, a link I think all kinds of goodies. Oh, thank you.
Bob Stein: Thank you. Frodo. Have a good evening.
Frode Hegland: Fantastic. Bye bye.
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