Future Text Lab

The 23 March 2026 session of the Future Text Lab gathered Frode Hegland, Tom Haymes, Brandel Zachernuk, and Peter Dimitrious for a wide-ranging discussion centred on the nature of knowledge interaction in XR — specifically what it means to navigate, manipulate, and “enter” information spatially, as distinct from reading or writing in any conventional sense. The meeting wove together a live demo of Frode’s Author spatial mapping tool on visionOS, Tom’s ongoing project to build a personal knowledge navigator from his photographed bookshelves and Kindle library, and substantial theoretical exchanges touching on flow theory, LLM output quantity, the design philosophy of Doug Engelbart, the materiality of paper, the emerging poverty of vocabulary around knowledge-in-XR, and the role of music and photography as alternative channels for entering knowledge.

This session of the Future Text Lab community centered on what host Frode Hegland called the “movement of knowledge” — the challenge of transporting and reshaping personal and scholarly knowledge from traditional 2D computing environments into XR. Frode demonstrated a working prototype that uses AI to extract defined concepts from student notes and spatialize them in Apple Vision Pro, provoking wide-ranging discussion about the nature of spatial cognition, the inadequacies of existing knowledge organization tools, the analogy of medium phase-shifts in media history, the neuroscience of memory, and what it would mean to both author and browse knowledge in three dimensions.

This session centered on annotation as a practice and a design challenge, weaving together empirical research findings, philosophical reflections on meaning-making, and speculative design ideas for how annotation infrastructure might work in spatial and digital environments. The group explored what people actually do when they annotate, why they do it, and how to build systems that honor those purposes — from e-ink tablets and PDF markup to XR-based spatial knowledge objects.

The primary thread was the relationship between XR interfaces and knowledge work, examined through two contrasting live demonstrations. Frode Hegland showed his Author system running in a headset, visualizing metadata from the ACM Hypertext 2023 conference — people, papers, locations — with selection, layout, and focus controls operated via a spatial toolbar. 

Ken Perlin then demonstrated two prototypes: a hierarchical Wikipedia page viewer navigable with both controllers and hand gestures, and a semantic zoom demo using Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” where walking closer to an object progressively reveals its title, full text, and analysis. 

Sam Brooker introduced the ACM Hypertext 2026 conference (London, September 14–18), themed around “hypertext method” — hypertext understood not just as technology but as a way of thinking: non-linear, networked, dynamic. This framing set the stage for the group’s broader inquiry into how spatial computing might serve scholarly communities.

The primary focus was Frode Hegland’s presentation of two slides posing a specific design question: when displaying a citation or quote as a node in XR, what should be shown in its closed state versus its open state, and how should different types of scholarly objects — defined concepts/glossary terms, citations (author, title, BibTeX), and quotes (citation plus text) — be visually distinguished and navigated. Frode proposed showing three lines of a quote with author and title beneath in the closed state, with full scrollable content on open, and floated the idea that node depth could encode the amount of text contained. This design question opened into a much broader discussion about context versus content in spatial environments, the nature of AI-assisted versus manual navigation, and what spatial computing can do that flat screens simply cannot.

This session ranged across the conceptual and practical challenges of making text spatial, from live demos of the Author app running on Apple Vision Pro to a sustained debate about what document format — HTML, Epub, JSON, or something new — could serve as an open interchange standard for XR-based knowledge work. The discussion was anchored by Frode Hegland’s demonstrations and framing, but branched into deep territory on foldable document metaphors, the philosophical gap between available tools and human willingness to use them, the tension between long-term standards work and short-term experimentation, and nostalgia for abandoned paradigms like OpenDoc. The meeting also touched on upcoming community events, a Wikipedia-based XR demo by Ken Perlin, and Brandel Zachernuk’s perspective on the years-long timeline required to make the spatial web a genuine standard.

The session ranged across the lived experience of working with text and knowledge artifacts in XR, the challenge of representing time in spatial environments, the emerging gestural grammar of visionOS interactions, and the broader socioeconomic responsibilities that come with building new knowledge tools. Participants debated how color, scale, and depth might encode temporal information, explored the tension between computational precision and the necessary vagueness of human knowledge, and reflected on whether technology alone can deliver on its liberating promise — or whether intentional economic and cultural thinking must accompany the tooling.

The session explored spatial authoring and XR-based knowledge environments, with Frode demonstrating a 3D knowledge map prototype derived from meeting transcripts and AI-generated glossaries, prompting a wide-ranging discussion about gestures, selection models, timelines, writing practices, and how immersive systems might augment human thinking rather than replace it.

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.

This session explored whether and how XR environments can meaningfully augment how people read, understand, and relate to complex knowledge, using a concrete but deliberately constrained experiment: presenting a single letter as a spatial, interactive object. The discussion surfaced tensions between play and utility, emotional impact and practical value, and between exploratory artistic research and task-driven design, while reaffirming the group’s shared belief that spatial interaction with information opens fundamentally new cognitive possibilities that cannot yet be fully articulated.