AI: Summary
This session marked a shift from talking about tools to distributing them: the meeting opened with the group downloading and running a fresh macOS build of Origami Text, wrestling with Gatekeeper warnings, and confirming it launches — the first time the community has held the working software in hand together. Frode framed the context: a meeting with Marius of the ACM Hypertext community in Battersea has produced an “Advanced Documents Working Group” around Origami Text, aimed at the Hypertext Symposium in September. Origami Text was given its cleanest definition yet — an approach, not a brand: EPUBs that follow strict, plain visual guidelines (no frippery, because frippery breaks reader compatibility) while carrying a ton of metadata in the HTML and in JSON.
From there the session braided three threads. First, the technical substrate: how 3D content lives inside flat documents — the model element, USDZ export, PNGs carrying scene-reconstitution data in their Exif, and live spreadsheet tables that stay live when exported to EPUB. Second, a humanistic provocation from Vincent Murphy, freshly returned from Herculaneum: Roman wall graffiti as the social media of its day, dense with allusions that functioned as hypertext, and invisible to today’s headset-wearing tourists. Third, and dominating the back half: how should time itself be shaped in spatial environments? The group’s answer-in-progress — Sankey diagrams of idea lineage, contextual data streams alongside a Z-axis of papers, peripheral vision as a design surface — ended with Frode writing the build prompt live before participants had even left the call.
AI: Main Topic
How documents can carry richness without losing plainness — and how time should be given shape. The session kept circling one trade-off: the power of Origami Text is precisely its restraint (strict EPUB, metadata underneath), which lets 3D models, live tables, and reconstructable visualizations travel inside a format anything can open. The mirror question, sharpened by Herculaneum and by Interatlas‘s 500-million-year slider, was what a reader should experience when time is the dimension that matters: a line to read across, a corridor to walk down, a floor to stand on, or — the emerging favourite — flows of ideas beside the documents, with legitimacy signalled by the density of connections in and out.
AI: Highlights
The build run. Tom, Eric, Peter Wasilko and Peter Dimitrios downloaded the new Origami Text for macOS live. Apple’s “could not verify” warning required the Privacy & Security override, prompting Tom’s observation that “normals” would give up or run away at that point — accepted for now, since this build is community-only: “we’ve got to design this together.” Tom later killed the app entirely by loading a book-length EPUB (taking several other Mac processes down with it) and was asked to send the offending file as a bug report.
The working group. Frode’s meeting with Marius produced enthusiasm and a plan: a working group around Origami Text to show at the Hypertext Symposium in September, with papers already contributed by Marius and Mark Anderson. The Overleaf/LaTeX importer matters here: ACM submissions arrive as LaTeX zips, and Origami Text can now open them with references, images, and tables intact — no production change asked of authors.
The Mac demo. Pin (renamed from favourite) and set-aside states for papers; a planned hold-up-the-page feature where OCR on a printed sheet finds and opens the matching document in your library, underlines becoming annotations; citation copying that deliberately uses note and annotation fields rather than pure BibTeX — openness bought at the price of Zotero round-tripping; annotations on the web standard used by Hypothesis.
The headset demo. On visionOS, selecting a paper from a set of proceedings spreads its citations into the space behind it, receding on the Z axis sorted by time — newest nearest. Peter Dimitrios liked the timeliness for separating seminal papers from “modern AI-generated fluff.” Frode’s own verdict was candid: not yet useful, but fun, “and we need fun to start going further.”
3D inside flat documents. The Interatlas export writes everything needed to reconstitute a 3D scene — layers, viewpoint, scale, angles — into a PNG’s Exif, so the image is both preview and doorway. Brandel and the Peters connected this to OLE’s modern heir, App Intents. A long technical exchange with Brandel established that RealityKit‘s claim of exporting only .reality files may be a construction artifact, that everything Apple ships can render USDZ, and that the model element (in Safari 27 developer previews) is “a doorway to so much” — with Brandel’s write-up forthcoming. Eric’s test EPUB (generated by ChatGPT, embedding a Ted Nelson sculpture from the Internet Archive) showed Apple Books falling back to the placeholder image, while Origami Text opened the Interatlas scene through the app.
Live tables. A table built with Claude in Xcode for Author turned out to work as a real spreadsheet with equations — and stays live when exported to EPUB, changes saved as annotations with a revert-to-original button. Jupyter-notebook-like documents are, Frode argued, now eminently possible in plain EPUB.
The vibe-coding debate. Frode’s evidence for the new era: a French-language bug report pasted directly into Claude in Xcode, which translated it, enumerated the issues, and fixed them; a user complaint about Author slowing down resolved by asking Claude to find the bottlenecks. Brandel’s counterweight, from his years writing Dell’s weather app: prototypes are now trivially fast, but code that must survive seventy million users is not vibe-codable — a 0.4% bug still costs person-weeks of support and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Frode’s rejoinder: downloadable software doesn’t face server-scale crush, and the fact remains that Interatlas — hundreds of thousands of stars, shipping now — was built this way.
Herculaneum. Vincent Murphy, back from days absorbed in the site, described a book of 250 graffiti: Romans writing to each other on walls, alluding to Ovid and old verses — a shared allusive layer functioning as hypertext, and the best version of social media the ancient world had. His complaint: headset tours annotate the mosaics but never the graffiti, and never the context (a grain crisis, Claudius’s Rome) that would deliver the real “oomph.” Vincent’s chat-line coda: “2,000 years ago = Romans were TripAdvisoring.”
Engineers converting. Vincent’s second report: a 70-year-old precision rubber-testing firm, long AI-skeptical as good engineers are, has flipped — testing it until it breaks, then asking what else it can do, including bringing their accumulated data into spatial views.
A time element? Frode’s proposal by analogy: if HTML now has a model element, could there be a time element? Brandel’s answer widened it: time is far harder than casual contact suggests, and the web’s most needed bedrock standards are time and space — geospatial coordinates as first-class entities. He has been extracting lat/long data from Wikipedia toward exactly that. His deeper point: stereoscopic viewing has an intrinsic situatedness — you are responsible for positioning yourself, with none of the “philosophical anonymity” of watching a shared screen from nowhere.
Writing and thinking. Prompted by Benja’s question about why we store things away at all — “acorns,” as Peter Dimitrios re-termed bookmarks — Frode summarised the cognitive science he’s gathered: private annotations are rough and highlighting barely works, but the expectation of sharing makes people annotate better and remember more. Tom widened it: writing is one form of thinking, not the only one; social media proves people write scads without thinking; linear text can let a good story cover an absence of thought, which chunking into ideas exposes — “the emperor with no clothes.” With his Foucault hat on: language is power, and jargon is how in-groups keep others out.
The legitimacy clash. The session’s one genuine disagreement. Tom pressed repeatedly that legitimacy is central — the vaccine-autism study as a bad paper made politically load-bearing by peer review, education’s groundbreaking studies with samples of thirty. Frode agreed it matters and ruled it out of scope for presentation design: “once you have data that you trust… what is a useful means through which you want to navigate it?” The partial synthesis came from Tom himself: connections in and out of a paper are themselves a measurable legitimacy signal.
Shapes for time. The closing design jam. Tom asked for pathways of allusion fading over distance and time (does Greek literature count? Persian? Chinese?), for a diversity index of Rome overlaid on the United States, and — via David Macaulay’s Cathedral and Regensburg’s Donkey’s Tower — for the scaffolding of ideas made visible the way construction scaffolding once was. Benja, reading How Things Work to his son, wanted personalised peripheral relevance: look at a column and see only the muses that matter to you. His Sankey diagram suggestion — different-sized pipes tracing an idea’s lineage, the way a kernel in one paper becomes the thing everyone cites — became the session’s concrete output: Frode wrote the prompt live for papers-on-Z with a Sankey stream alongside (yearly temperature extremes as placeholder data, Nasdaq as a mischievous candidate), promising something to show next week. Eric added the peripheral-vision toolkit in chat: colors, shapes, small animations, gradients, shaders; Peter Dimitrios proposed fading and transparency to show distance instead of literal XYZ. And the sharks: Tom’s demand for shark tracks over whale tracks sent Frode live-prompting Claude mid-session — the sharks never arrived, a small honest demonstration of both the speed and the limits of the new way of working.
AI: Insights
The distribution moment changes the group’s character. For years the Lab has discussed what should exist; this session opened with participants installing what does. The Gatekeeper friction, the book-length EPUB crash, the missing PDF import — these are the complaints of users, not spectators, and Frode explicitly framed the roughness as a feature: the community must design it together before “normals” ever see it.
Restraint is the radical move. The session’s deepest coherence was between Origami Text’s no-frippery rule and the export philosophy: a PNG that is merely a PNG everywhere, but a full 3D scene where understood; a table that is merely a table, but a live spreadsheet where supported. Graceful degradation as ideology — invent as little as possible, because change is expensive, and let the metadata carry the ambition.
Herculaneum is a design brief, not an anecdote. Vincent’s graffiti — allusive, social, context-dependent, ignored by official tours — is precisely the “peripheral vision” problem Tom named: documents and citations focus attention by design, but the interesting knowledge is often beside the focus (the drought before the French Revolution). A system that can annotate the wall, not just the mosaic, is a system that treats context as content.
The legitimacy disagreement is really a layering question. Tom and Frode were not actually opposed: Tom argued legitimacy cannot be ignored; Frode argued it cannot be solved at the presentation layer. The Sankey/connection-density idea quietly resolves it — making the structure of citation visible is a way of rendering legitimacy without adjudicating truth, which may be the only honest thing a reading environment can do.
Time as first-class primitive is the emerging agenda. Between the model element precedent, Brandel’s call for time and space as bedrock web standards, Eric’s preference for time on the Z axis “where going forward takes you back,” and the Sankey experiment now being built, the Lab has effectively chosen its next research object: not documents in space, but documents in time, in space.
AI: Resources Mentioned
Origami Text macOS build — Dropbox link shared by Frode for live installation; defined as strict plain EPUB plus rich metadata in HTML and JSON; new folded-origami icon.
Advanced Documents Working Group — formed with Marius of the ACM Hypertext community after a Battersea meeting, targeting the Hypertext Symposium in September; papers contributed by Marius and Mark Anderson.
Xanadu Space, Ted Nelson — Eric Rangell’s recollection of the OpenGL demo with transclusions flying up from related documents; video link shared in chat by Peter Dimitrios: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA&t=181s
model element / USDZ / Model I/O — technical thread with Brandel Zachernuk; Apple documentation link shared: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/modelio; Brandel’s blog post on the model element forthcoming; Safari 27developer previews required.
Eric Rangell’s test EPUB with embedded 3D model (Ted Nelson sculpture from the Internet Archive), generated by ChatGPT — EPUB, model, and generating conversation all shared in chat.
Interatlas — Frode’s Earth/solar system app used throughout: ocean currents, sea lanes, flights, tagged whale migrations, ~4,000 Argo floats, sea-level and terrain-exaggeration controls, 500-million-year plate tectonics.
Book of 250 Herculaneum graffiti — described by Vincent Murphy, compiled by a professor (name rendered in the transcript as Vincent Huneke) placing the wall texts in their allusive and historical context.
Writing on the Wall — shared in chat by Tom Haymes as a good history of social media: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/writing-on-the-wall-9781408842089/
Michel Foucault — invoked by Tom Haymes on language as power and jargon as in-group control.
The Wakefield vaccine-autism study — cited by Tom Haymes as a bad study made central to political discourse by peer-reviewed publication.
David Macaulay, Cathedral (and related books) — cited by Tom Haymes for construction-over-time as a metaphor for the scaffolding of ideas; the Donkey’s Tower beside Regensburg cathedral as a surviving artifact of construction.
How Things Work — the book Benja Gooder reads with his son, source of his personalised-relevance vision.
Sankey diagrams — proposed by Benja Gooder for tracing idea lineage; adopted by Frode as the next build target alongside the Z-axis paper view.
Game of Life generations prototype and the zzStructure — recalled by Eric Rangell as the structure that captures multi-dimensional rotation through connected data.
Ward Cunningham’s federated wiki — noted in chat by Peter Dimitrios for its lineup of pages as Miller Columns.
Douglas Engelbart — invoked in chat by Eric Rangell: think about how Engelbart wanted to help people study large documents.