Agenda
- Review of what we have done, with a walkthrough of the XR system.
- Discuss Plato’s Extended Reality and review of perspectives presented and insights we have made.
- Spatial Annotations will be discussed.
- Potential for Monthly Journal. How to distribute, how to connect? Might this be useful? Skyreader
- Next month: Authoring in XR.
AI Summary
The session explored how XR might transform reading, annotation, and meeting memory by making text spatial, embodied, and navigable, while also debating how future records of intellectual work could be queried, remixed, and preserved across time through interoperable systems, journals, notebooks, and immersive archives.
The primary focus was on spatializing knowledge in XR, particularly annotations, citations, and meeting records, alongside Frode Hegland’s live demonstration of moving text, maps, and bibliographic objects inside a headset environment, framed by a broader discussion about context, embodiment, progressive disclosure, and how communities might later walk through their own intellectual history.
Frode Hegland demonstrated spatial maps, embedded citations, and movable textual structures inside Apple Vision Pro, describing them as “index cards in space” and a possible architecture for meeting records
Tom Haymes emphasized Enlightenment thinking, digital “beanbags,” and using searchable notebooks for transcripts and books
Tess Rafferty reported on embodied XR reading, avatar-based microphones increasing participation, and the cathartic effect of physically pushing information away or pulling it closer
Brandel Zachernuk discussed kinetic typography in immersive space, spatial cognition without visual imagery, provenance of annotations, and XR poetry experiments
Fabien Bénétou outlined interoperability-focused proposals for capturing collaboration artefacts, containerized systems, and spatial timelines of work
Indie (OMI) introduced work at the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group and research plans for metaverse-based data integration, libraries, biosphere reserves, and responsible AI
AI: Insights
XR is being reframed less as a display technology and more as a cognitive environment whose bodily demands may improve comprehension rather than distract from it
Spatial annotation may become a bridge between close reading and large-scale sense-making, allowing thoughts to be physically grouped, transported, and inherited by others
Meeting archives could evolve from transcripts into walkable environments that preserve intellectual trajectories across months or years
There was tension between immersive contextual richness and minimal “rectangle”-style reading spaces, suggesting multiple XR literacies rather than a single dominant paradigm
Interoperability emerged as more fundamental than interface novelty, positioning file formats, provenance, and container systems as prerequisites for meaningful XR knowledge systems
Participants implicitly converged on the idea that future discourse may adapt to machine readership, but only gently and voluntarily rather than through rigid procedural speech
AI: Resources Mentioned
Future Text Lab page by Frode Hegland
https://futuretextlab.info/2026/01/22/26-jan-2026/
Tom Haymes article
https://ideaspaces.net/we-need-the-enlightenment-now-more-than-ever/
Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet Murray mentioned by Tom Haymes
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262631877/hamlet-on-the-holodeck/
Axios “Smart Brevity” shared by Brandel Zachernuk
https://www.axios.com/smart-brevity
Open Metaverse Interoperability Group shared by Fabien Bénétou
https://omigroup.org
Virbela shared by Brandel Zachernuk
https://www.virbela.com
Google NotebookLM example shared by Peter Dimitrios
https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/dd74a669-a3af-4013-a1a0-3a91b572a9bb
Social Media Post
Future Text Lab:
XR reading, spatial annotations, walkable meeting archives, digital beanbags, and interoperable knowledge systems reshaping how communities think together.
#FutureOfText #XR #SpatialComputing #KnowledgeDesign #Metaverse
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)
Pre-Meeting Posting: Conclusion & Spatial Annotations
It struck me when I went to read Peak Human (Norberg 2025) that it would be nice, and useful, to be able to ‘pull out’ sections of text, such as dates and names of people and places into space to help me ‘make sense’ of the information and to see it in context. This is of course inspired by the work of Dene and Fabien in XR; pulling text into space, last year.
I can imagine expanding on this, where each snippet of text has knowledge of its origin (in BibTeX of course) and enough metadata to participate in a semi structured and flexible environment. I can see the reader, a student perhaps, pulling out the name of a person (character in a story or author cited) as well as time or location based information in order to ‘get to grips’ with the contents. When interacting with these pull-outs/snippets/annotations/nodes/? The user can build shapes of knowledge to help them understand the material, much like writing notes (which they should also be able to do) in space, ‘around’ the main text. If these nodes could be kept in the environment independently from their source, the user could build from more than one source.
This is not trying to be an annotated bibliography, it’s a thought about a new way to extract knowledge and interact with it. I cannot implement any of this now, but it seems like a fruitful area for discussion.
Action Items
After this meeting Frode will put together a monthly Journal entry and develop a method for automatically generate information from the meetings to view as nodes in Maps in Author visionOS.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/m9xk6siqr5q9zu4kad2gi/APycu6IaOtWR6rakiJe5EEk?rlkey=okayghz39b18acw5vlkdg74qd&dl=0 for full transcript of this month’s meetings.