This session combined three intertwined demonstrations with a wide-ranging discussion on spatializing knowledge. First-time participant Benja demonstrated a prototype writing tool that visualizes deeply nested parenthetical clauses as stacked layers, addressing working-memory limits in complex prose. This was followed by a Game of Life knowledge-sculpture prototype for visionOS and a demonstration of a live Earth-and-space environment featuring real-time satellites, extrudable terrain, and the ability to walk inside the planet's layers. The group then turned these demos toward a concrete challenge: designing a compelling spatial reading experience for the roughly thirty papers of the upcoming ACMHypertext Conference proceedings, which broadened into questions of annotation, curation, naming, and what a community's unit of published conversation should be.
https://futuretextlab.info/2026/08/03/3-august-26/

The session opened with a live walkthrough of building, running and notarising a native application by conversing with Claude inside Xcode, followed by a demonstration of an existing globe and solar-system app on Vision Pro, and then turned into a sustained inquiry into what a personal knowledge space should actually contain and how its contents should behave once they are in space. Much of the conversation circled one question put to everyone in turn — what are the things you would want to hold, move and connect? — with answers ranging from books, artworks and works-in-process to overheard names, calendar entries, transcript fragments and thoughts had while walking. Running alongside were threads on perception, movement and attention as design constraints, on provenance and social annotation, and a more sober thread on what these tools cost and what still cannot be handed to them. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/07/22/27-july-26/

The session centered on how conversational coding inside a native development environment has collapsed the cost and effort of making bespoke software, letting non-programmers prototype working tools for their own letters, notes, and knowledge simply by writing prose — and on what that means for a community of text and hypertext researchers who want to exchange knowledge freely. Around live demonstrations of rapidly built apps (a messaging-and-notes tool, glossary and connection views, an interactive globe, and a dimensional zzstructure navigator), the group heard a presentation reframing the purpose of information tools as "navigational systems" grounded in distributed cognition, explored peer-to-peer file sharing for the community, and debated what is genuinely new versus already well-trodden, and where AI relocates rather than removes intellectual work.
https://futuretextlab.info/2026/07/17/21-july-26-2/

This session centered on a live demonstration of Origami Text, a peer-to-peer communication experiment in which each message is a self-describing, plain-text JSON file carrying Visual-Meta-style metadata, built almost through conversational "vibe coding" with Claude acting as a client inside Xcode. The host argued that the threshold for creating serious, robust applications has collapsed to a few hundred pounds of tokens, turning software itself into "wet clay" the community can reshape mid-conversation, and invited participants to propose views and interactions that were then built live during the call. Discussion ranged across what such a system offers beyond existing messaging tools, the history and pitfalls of link types and federated systems, local-first security realities, identity and metadata challenges, ZigZag and other hypertext lineages, and what all of this means for XR knowledge spaces. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/07/11/13-july/

This session explored what the fundamental elements of a spatial knowledge environment should be, launched by an AI-assisted inquiry into neuroscience and psychology which concluded that connections, not objects, are the primary units of thought. The conversation wove through the reconstructive nature of memory, the failure of education systems to teach thinking rather than conformity, a sustained debate over whether original ideas exist, the problem of provenance and intellectual property for transclusion, and how documents might be restructured, connected, and lived in within AR environments such as visionOS. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/07/06/6-july-2026/

This session carried the month's figure-and-ground theme into a concrete new use case, prompted by a first-time participant from the world of corporate law: the headset as a space for contested negotiation and dispute resolution. 

The working premise, carried over from the previous week, is that what distinguishes headset work is not "knowledge work" but contested synthesis — holding a quantity of not-yet-structured material in space and arguing it into shape. Around that spine the group examined what it means to lay out two positions spatially, move issues between open and resolved, and let an AI act inside the room rather than only answer from outside it. Running alongside were the perceptual grounding for the theme — how foveal and peripheral vision should govern what a node shows — the pedagogy of making a learner's thinking visible through their AI chat logs, and a steady caution that a visual, persuasive medium is believed too easily. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/06/23/29-june-26/

This session deepened the group’s figure-and-ground thread into a genuine reframing: the difficulty of showing relationships in a 360-degree knowledge space is not a problem of where to route a connective line, but a problem of signification — of how out-of-view information can keep doing the work that knowledge-in-the-world is supposed to do. 

Drawing on Don Norman’s affordances and signifiers, Donella Meadows’ systems thinking, and the founding choices of hypertext, the conversation worked through what a node should reveal when closed, how to distinguish an author’s corpus from collaborations and shared topics, the multisensory and dispositional dimensions of perception, and the constraints that XR swaps in rather than removes. Threaded throughout was a reflection on human–machine co-evolution, sharpened by Mazlish’s fourth discontinuity, alongside a running live demonstration of one AI briefing another to render the session’s own song and quotations into image and video. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/06/22/22-june-2026/

This session continued the month's theme of figure and ground applied to reading and thinking in XR: when potentially every digital document is available at once, how do we decide what to bring forward and what to leave as background? Using a long, heavily structured online essay as a shared test case, the group worked across three registers at once — the practical question of how such a piece might be re-presented spatially, the physiological limits of human reading, and the deeper conceptual question of how to make the process of thinking visible rather than only its finished products. Running underneath was a candid thread about the present state of headset adoption and the everyday frictions that decide whether anyone bothers to put one on. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/06/22/22-june-2026/

This wide-ranging session, held in the hours before Apple‘s Worldwide Developer Conference, circled around a single underlying question: what is the right relationship between a person, their knowledge, and a designed space — physical or in XR. Conversation moved fluidly between flow states and active engagement, the perceptual default of the human visual system, contested histories and multiple narratives, immersive environments as persuasive “atmospheres,” and the craft of guiding rather than overwhelming a reader. A live demonstration of marked-text “sculpting” in Author grounded the more philosophical threads, while recurring touchstones — the Vatican, Rome, Kashmir, and Stewart Brand‘s How Buildings Learn — kept returning the group to how spaces shape understanding. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/06/08/8-june-26/

This session, framed around the theme of "figure and ground" (document versus workspace), explored how authoring in spatial computing should handle the vast surrounding context — references, notes, citations, and AI-generated material — that informs a piece of writing but never fully enters the final product. The conversation moved through the history of information artifacts (from cuneiform clay bulla to Warburg's wall panels to Robert Caro's articles on the wall), the physical and perceptual constraints of headset interaction, and the deeper question of how to represent "knowledge objects" in XR once a writer has decided how they relate. A recurring undercurrent was the search for the right name for this surrounding space, alongside a sustained reflection on writing as the work of building, escaping, and controlling one's own frames. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/05/27/1st-of-june-2026/