Not many people would think it reasonable to that a person watching TV would mistake what they see for the full view of reality. Most likely, anyone being presented with such a position would recall Plato’s writing of Socrates telling the Allegory of the Cave.
I contend that there is another useful perspective to this, and that is how we view most of our knowledge through flat frames of personal computers and smartphones. Knowledge compressed into flat and framed forms have served us incredibly well, and will continue to do so. There is no question that the five thousand years of humans working with text on flat surfaces have had tremendous augmentation results, but that does not mean that future developments of text has come to an end.
I find it hard to communicate the potential transformative power of working in a fully immersive, un-framed, spatial–not flat environment. Such an ‘Extended Reality’ (XR), primarily experienced in headsets, of which the user can experience ‘Virtual Reality’ (VR) with the physical world fully locked out and ‘Augmented Reality’ (AR) where the physical world remains visible.
It’s not about better finding a truth — facts are easily available, it’s about developing the space through which we can interact with them, connect them, and experience their contexts.
Over the last few years The Future of Text Lab (FTL) has experimented to experience different ways of ‘being’ in XR, including a focus on a ‘knowledge sculpture’ a fully sphere or knowledge explored from a rotating chair, walking in information in an empty or scenic space and walking in information while staying in the physical world. What I have found is a horizon of potential and simultaneously the depth of my ignorance. What stands out from all the tests we have done is the visceral reaction people have had when they can pinch a piece of knowledge – which can be as simple as some text on a virtual index card — and move it in space, having it float wherever they put it, to organize their thoughts and ‘be in’ the information in entirely new ways. This is what drives the work forward.
At a time of heightened tension — “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition (Carney 2026)” — any potential cognitive uplift should be taken seriously.
It is not enough for people to be taught to be on the look out for ‘fake news’, to use better news sources, to check citations deeper and so on. What needs to happen to defend the values of a ‘liberal democracy’ will need to be nothing less than to work to ‘liberate’ our minds and how we view information and each other. XR is not any kind of be-all-and-end-all, but it has potential to be, let’s use another term from the ancients, an Archimedes point to help move us to a more augmented future where it’s not about tech (AI) thinking for us, but tech to help us shape our knowledge.
The Future of Text Lab will continue with this mission, to explore how we can think, learn and communicate better augmented by XR, with the limited resources we have available, for dialog, infrastructure support and building systems to ‘experiment to experience’ – or “demo or die”. We will continue this work but it is very clear that we will be much more effective with collaboration. This is why I am reaching out to potential partners.
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