When thinking about User Stories, it should feel like magic. Picture this: No noticeable headgear (imagine 10 years in the future with something light and comfortable, such as sunglasses today). Picture further that everything can be interactive–from digital items to physical items in your room–where you can use gestures, voice or tools for direct control and live in active environments where the elements in the environment itself shapes how information is presented. How would you want to work in an environment like this?
Modes of Interaction
Interact with text using my hands, voice and tools (keyboard, trackpad, pencil, controllers, etc.) so I can more comprehend the material more easily and intuitively than I can with a flat screen and a keyboard.
Work in a 360 degree environment.
Work in forward facing mode.
Have the freedom to place objects anywhere I like.
Shape Information Displays
Spotlight option to highlight one document or item at will in order to focus on it but still leave other items ready for future interactions, but dimmed during that period.
Saved environments to save me from having to manually set up a workspace every time, and instant change to different workspaces for the same information.
Access the last state stored to remind me what I was doing in my last session.
Access information based on where I was, when it was and who I was with when I wrote something, read something, annotated something.
Read & Annotate
Seamless reading and writing experience that allows for marking up text, annotating space, creating new text with text from the document being read
Knowledge Work
Synthesize other people’s material with my own impressions (even if just highlighting) and have the ability to restructure particles of content in a way that is more useful for me.
Connections
I want to be able to easily follow connections based on explicit links, implicit links, keywords, names, timelines, and more.
I want to be able to author connections in flexible, dynamic ways.
Environment
Work in environments where I can create my own memory palaces which can be formed in physical and virtual space. I want to work in my real world-augmented–and in worlds of virtual views of colour and vibrancy as well as environments of calm and focus.
Ability to save a scene so that all my documents and other items are located in the same place they had been left.
Control over aesthetic design of environment.
Information Access
Have Local & Offline access to XR space without having to connect to external services.
Access single documents, multiple documents, my own Library and external resources.
Interact with single documents, multiple documents, my own Library and external resources for everything from reading a single page, to seeing an entire document opened on a ‘wall’ to navigating connections between documents and people based on deep connections.
Interact with my information, whatever it is, in a richly visual and interactive way, such as the GigaMapping approach: https://systemsorienteddesign.net/what-is-gigamapping/
Access in multiple virtual rooms/contexts/libraries all with their own characteristics, all synchronised.
Allow for open, rich metadata in an open manner which is connected to my traditional computer environment, to enabled rich interactions.
Use Advanced Documents
Interact with Documents which are self-contained and expandable. Documents can enter and leave as plain old PDF, HTML, images, video, etc. and expand into richly connected elements with infinite view potential and connectivity. Knowledge can exist as framed documents, as threads, as sculptures, as virtual agents and more.
Solo & Shared
Interact on my own, or in a shared virtual space.
Easily capture various particles and compositions and export them out of XR into an external medium (fx. send to email).
Share the environment with other users with a variety of options such as read only, edit, and own.
Option of leaving some items open to visitors of my space but locking other items.
A Note mode that makes it possible for others to see comments and respond to them
Contributions
The Future of Text community, Dene Grigar’s notes and Alan Laidlaw’s notes.