Future Text Lab

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Weekly podcast on the future of text from https://futuretextlab.info

-3 J

6 April '26

The 6 April 2026 session of the Future Text Lab was a wide-ranging exploration of what spatial knowledge nodes should look like, feel like, and be used for in XR environments. Grounded in Frode Hegland's introductory "Best of Both Worlds" presentation — which he prepared partly for Apple — the group examined the furl/unfurl paradigm for nodes in space, what granularity of content belongs in them, how thinking and publishing are fundamentally different media, and whether spatial computing has yet found its HyperCard moment. Historical predecessors from HyperCard to Zettelkasten to Hyper Words were traversed alongside live demonstrations, while the writing process itself — sketching, core-dumping, polishing — became a mirror for understanding what a spatial thinking environment should do.

5 min
1 AVR.

The Future of Text Symposium '26

This year's Symposium will be on the 14th of September, returning to London College of Communication. 'The Future of Augmented Thought"

5 min
31 MARS

30 March '26

This session brought together the Future Text Lab community to examine the cognitive science underpinning spatial text interfaces and to develop a practical design philosophy for combining traditional framed displays with XR nodal environments — specifically through Apple Vision Pro and the in-development Author application. The discussion moved from reading science and dual visual processing through to hands-on questions of what participants would actually use such a spatial knowledge environment for, probing the gap between theoretical excitement and personal necessity.

6 min
25 MARS

23 March '26

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.

7 min
25 MARS

16 March '26

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.

6 min
25 MARS

9 March '26

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.

6 min
25 MARS

2 March '26

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.

8 min
25 MARS

23 February '26

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.

6 min

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Weekly podcast on the future of text from https://futuretextlab.info

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