Frode Hegland & I learned last week that our project, “The Future of Text in XR,” was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Here is the link to the Future of Text website with detailed information about our work, including videos and prototypes.
Abstract
We believe a fundamental change will occur when working in XR becomes the norm because when we see different, and we can interact differently, we become different. Our concern is that the paradigms of working in XR will be owned solely by commercial entities that have their own priorities. Therefore, our goal is to inspire and enable powerfully useful XR workspaces & workflows. We aim to inspire through building experiences that are truly useful, not just demos, and we aim to enable others through community dialog & support for open infrastructures. To fully augment knowledge work in XR, dialog is crucial but it also becomes necessary to build systems that are better than ‘what ships with the headset’. We have chosen to focus on augmenting academic reading and authorship first, with open systems that anyone can take advantage of to build ‘power tools’ for the mind for other user groups as well.
Advisory Board
- Vint Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet
- Ismail Serageldin, founder of the modern Library of Alexandria
- David De Roure, Academic Director, Digital Scholarship, University of Oxford
- Barbara Tversky, author of ‘Mind in Motion’
- Bob Stein, co-founder of The Voyager Company, Future of the Book
- Bruce Horn, programmer of the original Finder in the Macintosh, currently at Apple working on Siri
- Howard Rheingold, author of ‘Tools for Thought’, educator
- J Yellowlees Douglas, pioneer author & scholar of hypertext fiction
- Livia Polanyi, theoretical linguist & consulting Professor of Linguistics, Stanford University
- Ted Nelson, pioneer and coiner of the term ‘Hypertext’
Future of Text Lab Members
- Alan Laidlaw, an independent researcher working on pixel-free interactions and peripheral interfaces. He looks at information technology the way a geomorphologist looks at civil engineering
- Andreea Ion Cojocaru, licensed architect and a software developer
- Fabien Benetou. Prototyping at the European Parliament Innovation lab
- Peter J. Wasilko, Esq. Attorney, Programmer, and Independent Scholar residing in Ossining, New York
- Brandel Zachernuk, working on open Web standards for XR at Apple
- Mark Anderson, independent researcher in Hypertext and Knowledge systems. Associated with the Web & Internet Science (WAIS) Lab at the University of Southampton
- Leon van Kammen. Creative Technologist & Researcher
- Rob Swigart, author of games, interactive media, and novels
Objectives
Our objectives are to 1) support dialog for how to work with text in XR, 2) build XR software and, 3) develop metadata infrastructures to support software interaction that integrates with real-world workflows.
Proposed Activities
1) Community building and support for dialog, including weekly lab meetings, annual Symposium, student competition, and continued publication of volumes of The Future of Text, with a focus on text in XR
2) Software development for WebXR with a focus on reading for the first year and authorship the second year
3) Visual-Meta Infrastructure support for more robust & open metadata, at very low cost to users & publishers.
Expected Outcomes
The potential of XR is too important to leave only to commercial developers. Keeping in mind the expression, “first we shape our tools, then our tools shape us,” the paradigms we develop for work in XR now will influence the imagination for generations to come. This project will result in better understanding of how powerful working in XR can be, far beyond the vision of any one software development company. We are the last generation not to be working in XR, at least during part of our workday. Let’s make sure we think this through, together.
Final Thoughts
The Electronic Literature Lab is excited about other possible outcomes of this project. First, it provides us the ability to experiment with a new kind of metadata that this project is specifically developing for XR environments––namely Visual-Meta. Second, it may open up new ways of expressing born-digital literature, art, and games where words and other forms of text can be experienced in a more immediate and visceral way in XR. Third, it will help us dig deep into practices of preserving and conserving XR-oriented works.