Where are we with this?

With the introduction of powerful VR in the form of the Vision Pro next year, 40 years after the Macintosh, we will see the introduction of potentially ground-breaking means through which we can interact with our information and each other, to truly augment our mental abilities. However, I am concerned that we are wasting this historic opportunity. We think we ‘know’ what digital text is, we think digital text is what we use in word processing applications, email, messages, spreadsheets, the web and that's pretty much it. We ‘know’ what digital text is, so we stop exploring what it can be. Doug Engelbart remarked that dreaming is hard work. He was so right, and I believe that we need to be shaken out of our paradigms to think anew. And I think that is–potentially–the most valuable thing being at the cusp of a headset world gives us; the opportunity to think anew, to inspire new and more open thinking about what interactivity is, what augmentation can do, how we can view our information, how we can connect, how we can become better, more connected, humans. There are some very basic issues we need to address before we can truly say we are opening up the vistas available to us. If we as a community do not look into this deeply, I think we are headed for VR experiences as boxed-in as the CDs and DVDs of yesteryear. If we do not, as a community, really consider these issues and delegate them to the large tech companies who makes the equipment, we will not own the future, we will not own the potential, they will, and their motivations are not the same as ours. A scenario. I open a book while wearing a headset–it doesn't matter if I'm in VR or AR mode–and it floats in front of me, at a comfortable reading distance and angle. So far so nice and simple. I then make a gesture and all the images; the photographs, charts, graphs and tables flow out of the book and onto the wall at the back of the room. There is also a beautiful 3D model encoded in one of the pages. In the traditional, flat, version of the book, this model appears as a still image and the metadata is recorded at the back of the book for situations like this. I take this model out and put it right in front of me so that I can look at it properly and interact with it. I also decide to take the Reference section out of the back of the book an place it on the side, over here, and from that I can easily summon the sources and see relationships between them. This sounds like a very interesting environment for Spatial Hypertext right? Maybe we should call it something new, since it is fully dimensional, not flattened. Apple has introduced the name Spatial Computing with the Vision Pro, so how about Spatial Computing Hypertext? That is only intended as a provocation, not as a serious suggestion. We just need to think about what this space is. This space is not cyberspace, it is a visual environment on a human scale. Headset computing is built for humans, it is not built for machine-machine interaction or offloading thinking, which, in contrast, much of AI is. It therefore needs to fit us, like no technology has needed to before, if it is to extend us.