Dene Grigar (Professor, DTC Vancouver, Electronic Literature Lab) and her Co-PI, Frode Hegland (University of Southampton, United Kingdom), were awarded $250,000 USD from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for their project “The Future of Text In Extended Reality.” The funding begins in January 2024 and supports three initiatives relating to Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality, which are collectively called “Extended Reality” or “XR”:
- Dialog (Lab meetings and Symposium)
- Develop webXR software (initially for reading augmented PDFs and interacting with libraries of documents)
- Metadata to augment PDFs, using the Visual-Meta approach
Their Advisory Committee includes well-known technology luminaries such as:
- 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: How Action Shapes Thought;
- Howard Rheingold, author of Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology;
- Livia Polanyi, Theoretical Linguist & Consulting Professor of Linguistics, Stanford University;
- Ted Nelson, Internet pioneer and coiner of the term “hypertext”;
- and others.
For more information about the project, visit https://thefutureoftext.org/xr/.