We will discuss the January Project, with a focus on the potential of Academic Posters in XR. The “January project,”is a concrete exploration of how a single letter could be authored, read, and experienced in XR. The notion to discuss today is that perhaps this letter can serve as test for how an academic poster can appear in XR.
We decided to add a few more citations to the letter and to experiment with how nodes appear and are connected.
AI: Summary
The session explored how a single written letter could be transformed into a spatial XR experience to demonstrate the future of text, focusing on how documents, citations, and concepts can become manipulable objects in space rather than static pages. The discussion treated XR as an exploratory, artistic medium rather than a solved HCI problem, using constraints to surface new possibilities.
AI: Main Topic
The primary topic was the January experiment: turning a short PDF letter into a spatial XR experience using Author and Reader on visionOS, intended as a compelling demonstration for an external recipient. The group examined what XR can reveal that flat documents cannot, including spatial citation structures, embodied navigation, and perceptual cues such as proximity, clustering, and movement.
AI: Highlights
Dave Millard’s reaction to the XR prototype was emphasized, particularly his description of spatial notes feeling like physical post-its and his suggestion that this approach could support literature reviews and spatial academic posters.
A central question was articulated: what can the XR version of a letter show that cannot be seen on a page, beyond novelty.
Multiple participants highlighted that walking through information, rather than manipulating a virtual camera, preserves user agency and creates a qualitatively different reading experience.
There was strong interest in recording user perspective during XR exploration, not as product output but as research data capturing first-time reactions.
The group agreed that February’s project would explore people-centric XR, shifting the primary node from documents to individuals and their relationships.
AI: Insights
The discussion reframed XR work as intentionally “solution-seeking,” where the goal is to discover what new representational pictures can exist rather than to solve predefined problems.
Spatialization alone was recognized as insufficient; the value emerges when spatial cues support meaning, such as emphasis through distance, relevance through proximity, and relationships through selective visibility.
Participants identified a persistent tension between visual richness and cognitive clarity, noting that what aids one kind of thinking can obscure another.
The group converged on the importance of separating knowledge from representation: position, color, and shape are not the knowledge itself, but surfaces through which deeper, addressable structures are revealed.
A strong conceptual shift emerged around file formats: existing 3D formats privilege objects, while knowledge work requires formats that privilege identifiers, relationships, and reuse across contexts.
XR was framed as a new “print shop” moment, where shared physical manipulation of information enables collective understanding and cultural transition rather than individual productivity alone.
AI: Resources Mentioned
Author and Reader (mentioned by Frode Hegland)
https://futuretextlab.info/
visionOS (mentioned by multiple participants)
https://developer.apple.com/visionos/
Dave Millard (mentioned by Frode Hegland and Mark Anderson)
Barbara Tversky (mentioned by Frode Hegland)
S-Expressions (mentioned by Mark Anderson)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-expression
vCard / CardDAV (mentioned by Fabien Bénétou)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard
Adobe Illustrator and Blender (mentioned by Brandel Zachernuk)
Song
This track is an AI orchestrated piece inspired by the transcript of this meeting, meant as a fun provocation to further thought. (suno.com)
Different song, on Soundcloud: