Agenda
- Discussion and update on the January Project (AR/VR, Work list, letter comments etc.)
- Starting a Monthly Journal based on Projects?
- Thoughts on a February Project : People
- Thoughts on March Project : Connected Knowledge
AI: Summary
This session explored whether and how XR environments can meaningfully augment how people read, understand, and relate to complex knowledge, using a concrete but deliberately constrained experiment: presenting a single letter as a spatial, interactive object. The discussion surfaced tensions between play and utility, emotional impact and practical value, and between exploratory artistic research and task-driven design, while reaffirming the group’s shared belief that spatial interaction with information opens fundamentally new cognitive possibilities that cannot yet be fully articulated.
AI: Main Topic
The primary focus was a live demonstration and critique of an early visionOS-based prototype that renders a document as a navigable spatial environment, with people, citations, and sections represented as manipulable nodes. This served as a catalyst for deeper discussion about spatial meaning, Z-axis semantics, gestures, metadata persistence, and whether XR should be evaluated as a tool for solving known problems or as a medium whose capabilities must first be discovered through play.
AI: Highlights
Frode articulated the core motivation as experiential rather than instrumental: the act of physically moving into information fundamentally alters how it is perceived and felt, even before clear “use cases” are defined.
Ken emphasized that XR knowledge environments should be egocentric and enveloping rather than planar, arguing that information should surround the user in a curved proximity space rather than sit on virtual walls.
Tess highlighted the strong emotional and aesthetic impact of close-range interaction, while noting difficulty in understanding structure and relationships at a distance, suggesting subtle visual cues such as color, shape, or symbolic markers.
Peter proposed that Z-axis manipulation could be made accessible on non-XR platforms through sliders, enabling pre-authored depth and gradual onboarding for users without headsets.
Tom suggested using bibliographic depth as a principled meaning for the Z-axis, allowing users to physically walk backward through chains of citation and intellectual ancestry.
Mark repeatedly pressed on the question of “what is gained,” challenging whether spatial decomposition genuinely enriches understanding beyond linear reading, and warning about scale, clutter, and cognitive overload.
Vincent reframed the work as part of a broader historical transition away from fixed, page-bound knowledge, arguing that playfulness is not incidental but essential for surviving the contemporary flood of information.
Tess introduced the idea that spatial manipulation of information could have therapeutic value, helping people externalize, sort, and dismiss cognitive clutter.
AI: Insights
The group implicitly recognized that XR’s primary contribution may be affective and embodied rather than informational, changing how knowledge feels before changing what knowledge is known.
There was a clear distinction drawn between metadata required for spatial interaction and descriptive metadata carried for scholarly or archival purposes, suggesting these should not be conflated.
Several participants converged on the idea that Z-space must mean something—time, citation depth, relevance, or attention—rather than acting as arbitrary spatial novelty.
A recurring tension emerged between task-first design and medium-first exploration, with no resolution but growing clarity that both approaches are necessary at different stages of research.
The discussion surfaced an unspoken but shared concern that without serious work on knowledge use, XR risks becoming dominated by entertainment alone, leaving its cognitive potential unexplored.
It became clear that “focus” and “removal” may be more important than expansion in XR knowledge systems, making disappearance, collapse, and narrowing first-class interactions.
AI: Resources Mentioned
Doug Engelbart, cited in relation to augmentation of human intellect, mentioned by Frode.
MIT Media Lab motto “Demo or Die,” referenced by Frode.
Overleaf and LaTeX, discussed in relation to BibTeX preservation and citation chaining, mentioned by Frode and Tom.
visionOS, discussed extensively as the current technical constraint space.
WebXR, referenced as an alternative platform with different affordances and limitations.
Barbara Tversky, referenced by Frode regarding skepticism toward spatial metaphors as solutions in search of problems.
Dave Millard, referenced by Frode as an example of strong emotional engagement when first encountering XR knowledge environments.
Issues to be Done
Song
This was about taking a single letter
and refusing to let it stay flat.
It was about asking what happens
when a document stops being a surface
and becomes something you stand inside.
The experiment was simple on purpose:
one text, a few names, some citations,
placed in space where distance matters.
Close up, things reveal themselves.
From far away, meaning dissolves.
And that contrast became the point.
Some saw promise in walking through citations,
sources behind sources stretching backward in depth,
the Z-axis becoming intellectual history.
Others warned that scale breaks beauty,
that too much space becomes noise,
that enrichment must earn its cost.
There was pushback on whether this adds knowledge
or just rearranges it.
Whether the headset gives insight
or simply a different feeling of control.
But the feeling mattered.
Several people returned to that.
The body moving toward information
changes attention.
Letting things fall away
can feel clarifying, even therapeutic.
Questions surfaced about access,
about who gets the hardware,
about whether this becomes a tool for work
or another channel for distraction.
The response was not certainty,
but intent.
This work isn’t claiming answers yet.
It’s claiming the right to explore a medium
before deciding what problems it solves.
The agreement, implicit but strong,
was that knowledge will not stay flat.
Even if we still don’t know
exactly what shape it wants to take.