Introduction to the Thinking Music aspect of The Future Text Lab.

This session centred on the evolving spatial interface of Author for visionOS, using Douglas Engelbart's 1962 paper as a large-scale test document. The conversation moved from concrete design questions — how section cards should look, how selection states should be rendered, how visual differentiation by category or search could work in an immersive space — into a deeper conceptual inquiry about the nature of supplementary knowledge in digital documents. The group explored what endnotes, footnotes, and annotations become when freed from the constraints of paper, seeking both a functional model and appropriate terminology for "the extra stuff" that surrounds a primary text when it inhabits three-dimensional space.

https://futuretextlab.info/2026/05/25/25-may-2026/

The session centred on a guest presentation by Mohit Yadav exploring how meaning arises through dynamic assemblages of known and unknown elements during encounters with the world, arguing that current tools fail to intervene at the moment of interaction and that a new category of "navigational systems" is needed to bring latent personal resources into active contact with present experience. The ensuing discussion wove together knowledge graph visualization, the cognitive role of fuzziness and analogy, the spectrum from precise definition to deliberate conceptual blurring, and the limits of graph-and-node metaphors when modelling genuine intellectual work.

https://futuretextlab.info/2026/05/09/11-may-2026/

This session brought together regular members and two newcomers — one joining from Mumbai, another from Moscow — for a wide-ranging exploration that moved from a live demonstration of Author on macOS and Apple Vision Pro, through a proposal for a simplified EPUB publishing format called Origami Text, and into a deep theoretical exchange on cognitive load, adaptive interfaces, and the relationship between knowledge, context, and spatial computing. The demonstration showed concept extraction, spatial node interaction, focus/unfocus gestures, and saved views in XR, while the format discussion examined how to make scholarly documents more accessible to both humans and AI by stripping EPUB back to semantic essentials and enriching it with structured metadata. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/04/28/6-may-2026/

Dave Millard is working hands-on in the Map view, testing node selection, movement, layout, and spatial organization. The conversation moves from immediate UX feedback into a deeper discussion about how AI should be integrated into the spatial workspace. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/05/02/millard-1-may-2026/

Across the four sessions of April 2026, the Future Text Lab circled a persistent and sharpening question: what, precisely, would compel someone to put on a headset and do serious knowledge work? The month opened with Frode Hegland's "Best of Both Worlds" presentation on foldable knowledge nodes in visionOS and progressed through a framework distinguishing "core" reading/writing space from "contextual" spatial surrounds, a confrontation with the Engelbart-scale question of whether the group is stuck designing mice without knowing what the mouse is for, and a concluding examination of document ownership, citation infrastructure, and the potential of ePub as a future scholarly container. A new participant, Tim Brookes of the Endangered Alphabets Project, introduced the theme of embodiment and manual skill in relation to digital abstraction. Throughout the month, generative writing — writing to discover rather than to transcribe — served as the conceptual spine connecting flat-screen authoring, spatial interaction, and AI-assisted research.

This session explored the intersection of AI in education, the crisis of academic publishing and document ownership, and the question of what a future-proof knowledge document format might look like. The conversation moved from how AI levels the playing field for students and reshapes teaching toward mastery-based learning, through the social and technical failings of current web and publishing infrastructure — siloed libraries, broken hyperlinks, pay-to-publish incentives — and arrived at a substantive design discussion about whether ePub, a new format, or enriched HTML could serve as the foundation for ownable, citable, shareable units of knowledge in a post-PDF world. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/04/27/27-april-26/

A presentation to 'Writ Large' hosted by Tim Brookes: This session of Writ Large featured a guest presentation of Author, a writing application with a spatial map feature running on Apple Vision Pro, designed to support generative writing — writing undertaken to think rather than to record what is already known. A compressed demonstration of the tool's spatial interaction model gave way to an extended group dialog that drew surprising and frequent connections between the presenter's XR work and the group's existing research into writing studies, including three-dimensional scripts, the ancient concept of ductus, embodied cognition, calligraphy, and the individuality of handwriting.

This session explored the tension between spatial movement and sedentary interaction in XR knowledge environments, the philosophical gap between incremental implementation and larger augmentation visions, and the nature of externalized knowledge and how it should be manipulated through gesture, voice, and overlay. The group discussed voice commands as an alternative interface for Author on visionOS, the concept of peripheral semantic multiplexing across mirrored displays, the role of AI as a dialogic medium for thought rather than a replacement for creative resolution, and the question of what form externalized knowledge should take when freed from flat screens. A recurring thread was the difference between designing interactions and merely executing them — and whether the community is building toward a clear enough vision of augmented thought for 2032.

This session wove together three interconnected threads: the design philosophy behind generative writing tools (specifically Author), the emerging framework of “core and contextual” writing spaces as a bridge between flat displays and XR, and the challenge of what meaningful interaction in XR actually looks like for knowledge work. The conversation moved from AI's role in education and writing practice, through the cognitive science of outlining, to a provocative closing framing: that current XR interfaces are the punch cards of their era, and the question before this community is what the equivalent of Engelbart's 1962–1968 project would look like today.