April Project : Beyond Reading & Writing in XR.
Working in XR is not really reading or writing in the traditional sense, it is ‘born digital’ in an entirely new dimension. We look at addressing what this might mean.
A brief introduction based on 2026 session transcripts so far: Beyond Reading & Writing. We have spent decades naming what we do with information. We read. We write. We search. We annotate. These words carry enormous weight — they encode centuries of cognitive practice, technology, and culture. But when we put on a headset and step into extended reality to work with knowledge, something happens that none of those words adequately describes. And the absence of a word for it is not a minor inconvenience. It is a central problem.
Secondary topic is what work would be useful in XR? Article writing?To be elaborated on…
AI: Summary
The 6 April 2026 session of the Future Text Lab was a wide-ranging exploration of what spatial knowledge nodes should look like, feel like, and be used for in XR environments. Grounded in Frode Hegland‘s introductory “Best of Both Worlds” presentation — which he prepared partly for Apple — the group examined the furl/unfurl paradigm for nodes in space, what granularity of content belongs in them, how thinking and publishing are fundamentally different media, and whether spatial computing has yet found its HyperCard moment. Historical predecessors from HyperCard to Zettelkasten to Hyper Words were traversed alongside live demonstrations, while the writing process itself — sketching, core-dumping, polishing — became a mirror for understanding what a spatial thinking environment should do.
AI: Main Topic
Frode Hegland opened with a presentation titled “Best of Both Worlds,” arguing that the genuine value of XR for knowledge work is not simply having virtual displays, but having many simultaneous displays in which rich information can be “furled” into compact nodes and “unfurled” back to full fidelity (Brandel’s term, in contrast with Frode’s “fold”). The claim is that this gives you the spatial context of text-in-space alongside the depth of text-on-surface. The presentation was also prepared for an audience at Apple. The bulk of the session then addressed two interlocked questions: what should live inside these nodes (concept, paragraph, section, full document?), and what interactions, visual affordances, and linguistic framing would compel someone to put on a headset and actually use such a system for serious thinking.
AI: Highlights
Jonathan Finn closed the session by emphasising that graphical differentiation between rectangles of text is a crucial and underserved design problem — doing it well would be transformative, and a “wall of text” is something to be actively designed against.
Frode Hegland noted, in closing, that Claude‘s typography in AI responses makes content easy to skim and read, and concluded that even in an age of AI, typography continues to matter.
AI: Insights
The insight that what we call web “pages” are really web “scrolls” was the session’s sharpest conceptual reframing. Brandel Zachernuk observed that a browser window today offers no stable spatial guarantee of what content lives within its bounds from one moment to the next, and that scrolling actively destroys the integrity of a document’s edges. Frode Hegland seized on this: if that is so, then the unit in spatial computing should be a true page — no scrolling — with unfurling as the mechanism for expanding content rather than vertical scroll.
Jonathan Finn introduced the most consequential structural distinction: that thinking and publishing are fundamentally different media. The Zettelkasten, mind maps, spatial nodes, and the Author app are all reaching toward a dedicated thinking medium that is not pretending to be Markdown or a Word document. The output — article, PDF, blog post — is a separate and subsequent act of translation into the lingua franca. The community has been circling this distinction for a long time; Jonathan named it with unusual clarity.
Brandel Zachernuk reframed progressive disclosure as a core ethical principle of interface design, contrasting it with what he described as Google‘s hubris in designing Chrome‘s browser history to hide all complexity and “just do the smart thing.” He argued that showing people the range of options — even impractical ones — is a form of granting agency, and that removing visible options strips people of the ability to imagine what else is possible. The Swiss Army knife was his recurring metaphor.
The session generated a new tension around furl/unfurl scale: Frode proposed that nodes should exist in only two meaningful states — very large (readable, editable, full document) or very small (glanceable, iconic) — with no intermediate size. Peter Dimitrios and Brandel had been imagining a more continuous proximity-based expansion (as Ken Perlin has explored), but Frode argued the binary is more cognitively honest about the difference between reading and scanning.
Brandel drew a link between the creative value of ugly sketches in visual work — redlines, rough storyboards — and the question of what “sketchy” looks like in text and music composition. The creative artifacts generated en route to a finished thing are meaningful even if discarded, and an ideal thinking environment might preserve and spatialise that messiness rather than hiding it. He asked Jonathan Finn directly what musical sketches look like for composers, eliciting a rich description of multi-scale composition planning — broad architecture first, then small melodic fragments — as an analogy for how spatial knowledge tools might be structured.
Masaki Hagino of Voyager Japan (met in person by Frode the prior week) presented “haiku design” or “subtitle design” — e-book pages with only 1–3 lines of vertical text, designed for mobile phone reading. The core claim was that the page boundary provides a cognitive refresh that continuous scrolling destroys. This landed as strong empirical support for the no-scrolling node model the group has been developing.
The question of what to call the spatial knowledge environment surfaced as a real obstacle. Frode acknowledged that terms like “knowledge sculptures” and “knowledge structures” are accurate but alienating, and that Google succeeded partly because its name became a verb. No equivalent term exists for “thinking spatially with a headset.” Frode is renaming a second companion app to Knowledge Base (split from Author) as a step toward clearer language; this was directly influenced by Peter Dimitrios criticising the previous naming.
The writing-process survey revealed a telling pattern: all participants describe a multi-stage process of core-dumping, unconscious incubation, and polishing — none writes Shakespeare-style from start to finish. Peter Wasilko described explicitly “tasking a background process” with a problem before gardening and returning to find the answer ready. This process has no adequate spatial-computing equivalent yet.
Skeuomorphic visual differentiation of node types was proposed and well-received. Frode referenced a principle he articulated in 1995: pictures get picture frames on the desktop, video gets sprockets. The same logic applied to nodes would mean: a stack of authored pages gets a book binder; personal scratch notes get a spiral; a single crystallised thought gets something else. Peter Wasilko added that Tinderbox already ages notes with a yellowing effect over time, which is exactly this kind of meaningful skeuomorphy.
The pie menu / radial menu was floated as the interaction model for nodes in space, with Frode suggesting tools could be either: (a) a context menu summoned on selection, or (b) a physical “magic wand” tool the user picks up and waves over content to apply operations. He linked this to gaze-based unfurling in visionOS, noting it must be handled carefully to avoid unintended explosions of content as the eye moves.
The question of student ownership of annotated texts became a notable thread toward the session’s end. Brandel observed that students own very little in a dorm room and that giving them a spatial environment that is genuinely theirs — where their annotations and interpretations mark territory — could be a compelling motivator for engagement. This connected to the broader “born digital, spatial first” principle that Frode attributed to a collaborator named Danny.
AI: Context
In previous sessions, the Author app had been in development and prototyping. As of this meeting, Frode confirmed that Author is now fully available in the App Store, and that the development team has moved on to rewriting the node system to make it more flexible — a significant milestone.
The idea of nodes as spatial knowledge objects and the “glance economy” of closed nodes has been a running thread; this session advanced it substantially with the binary furl/unfurl model and the push for skeuomorphic visual differentiation. The question “can you live in a library?” referenced by Frode as a line from a prior transcript by Peter Wasilko continues to resonate as a framing question.
The second app, previously unnamed or less defined, has now been named Knowledge Space and is being developed as the spatial map component separated from Author‘s writing component.
Music
Experimental music as summary. Lyrics