Future Text Lab

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...

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...

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, D...

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...

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 mult...

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 ...

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 abo...

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 en...

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 rel...

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 "con...

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 in...

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 exte...

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  visi...

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 p...

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 i...

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

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 process...

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 dem...

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 , provokin...

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 pur...

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...

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 a...

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, b...