Writing, with such freedom in place and scale, supplies a new dimension of meaning - maybe we can call it "reinforced concrete poetry."
All this is meant as a story-starter, though. What do you want to see as text in space?
What do you want to build?
Let's chat.
Growing the original's wide expanse of white all aroudn you allows for surreal, otherworldly focus on the text.
The speed and the scale of the words test the limit of conscious legibility, enhancing a sense that the poetry is absorbed as a *feeling* as much as read as a text.
Which brings us to today.
Poetic, creative writing is just as central to the human experience of reading. While the original was designed for screens, I wanted to work with material that points at the possibilities of relaxing into this new medium.
And the space itself matters too.
With "What do prototypes prototype?", the watershed 1997 paper, I built it as a museum exhibit, looking at the experiential - and social - consequences of spatial info:
Information architecture becomes load-bearing.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMr3...
And what about reading?
What matters about space, scale and proximity when you have the freedom of a gallery with none of the physical restrictions?
I made a Wikipedia-as-warehouse with Timeline VR.
Structure at a distance takes on new significance.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeKd...
Why poetry?
I've been pushing text into space as a hobby for over a decade, first with spatial, gestural word processing, where I first realized the gulf between mere "text entry" and truly "writing."
What is writing *made of*? How does it happen?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lxvi...
zachernuk.neocities.org/2026/yhchang/
(best viewed on a VR device)
It's a webXR rendition of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industry's LOTUS BLOSSOM, extracted twice - first the SWF file from the internet archive, and then the glyph data from the SWF into SDF text to display in type as big as your head.
In a world of spatial computing, what is the future of information?
What is the Future of Text? Of poetry?
In my spare time I used #threejs to revisit some of my favorite kinetic typography - video below, and link in the thread to experience it yourself:
The Alliance for OpenUSD has released the official 1.0 Specification!
aousd.org/news/core-sp...
If you to show products, configure 3D stuff or even do spatial web viz, please join AOUSD and the Web Interest Group to hear about what people are doing, and give input on how to make USD work for you!
3D models on the web have been at the center of my world for over a decade, and I’m so excited about where we are today.
We’ve got a new post about the HTML Model element and how to use it - and cool demos you can take a look at yourself! Check it out at webkit.org/blog/17118/a...
I've heard first-hand from engineers and designers at Facebook that their goal was "light-touch social" - comparatively superficial engagement that peters out if anyone gets too carried away. The platform choices are real, different and have far-reaching consequences for what's thinkable on each.
I like it, it's a very McLuhanesque reading.
But your point that LinkedIn is not Twitter is not Facebook is something finer-grained than McLuhan made, and those subtle (if at times, emergent) differences are immensely important.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFwV...
Want to know more about building great content for the spatial web in visionOS? I had the privilege to cover it at #wwdc24 - and the video is now live! Check it out at
developer.apple.com/videos/play/...
I hope it gets your wheels turning 🚲 about what you can do on the platform 😄
My first contribution to WebKit.org is up! Today we're pleased to introduce a new, privacy-preserving mode of input for WebXR. It's both standards-compliant _and_ more in line with user expectations on visionOS. Check it out!
webkit.org/blog/15162/i...
But we do ourselves a disservice by ignoring the other revolutionary moments that lead us to this point. Inventing the future is some of the hardest work we can pursue - but with luck, our descendants will see it as inevitable, even disbelieving there could be a time before it. 7/7
That said, there is something different about the present moment. Spatial computing gives us an opportunity to live and express outside the laws of physics, to encode and discern meaning without the explicit interaction with physical surfaces. 6/
And it’s also essential to understand that what looks revolutionary on a 5-year timeline is really only contributing at the margins of a vast, millennia-long project of better pursuing the universal human goal of expression and comprehension. 5/
I’m enormously optimistic about the scope of technology to change human life - that’s why I do what I do. But it’s also essential to understand that *everything* we interact with is technology, including reading and writing. 4/
Most people are aware that printing is only 500 years old - but did you know that _page numbers_ only became popular about 50 years later? And punctuation - including the *the spaces between words* - only really emerged as a standard 500 years before that, around 1000 AD? 3/
Why look to the past, and why bother going so far? Because it’s the only way we can see change at a scale we need to imagine for the future. Here in the early 21st century, it can be easy to feel like the way we communicate is more or less fixed. Not so! 2/
🧵 To help build the future of computing, I’m reading Steven Roger Fischer’s _A history of Reading._ It’s a stunning, yet matter-of-fact account of the last 5000 years of text and recording.
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo... 1/
Thank you sir, it's good to be here! When I heard Paul was helping kiwis off of the other place I was jumped at the opportunity.
There will be a little work pulling all the networks over but it looks like it'll be necessary, it's not going to get better :/
Many thanks to @paulbrislen.bsky.social for the invite - looking forward to a fresh start on here!
