Author visionOS

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Welcome to Author for the Apple Vision Pro headset. This has been written as a basic introduction for to how to interact with your information in the headset and why you might choose to do so.

In Author visionOS you are no longer working framed & flat, this is a spatial experience. You have a Toolbar at the bottom of your document with options ‘Write’ , ‘Outline & Sections’ and ‘Map’. Initially you will be in ‘Write’ mode, this is where you will see your document in the traditional way.

Write

‘Write’ mode in Author visionOS much the same way as in Author macOS. The focus on functionality on Author visionOS is expanding the spatial experience, hence there are more functions for the Map view to learn. You can select text for a context menu to perform some of the same functions as on macOS and you can write. And then you can expand your view. The toolbar at the bottom gives you the following options:

Ask AI Write Outline Map Settings

Outline

Outline. When you are in the Outline mode you can tap on Headings to jump to them.

Sections. When you tap to go to ‘Outline, the option expands to show both ‘Outline’ & ‘Sections’. Sections are headings in your document and all the text under them.

• If you tap ‘Sections’ you will see all the Headings in your document as nodes in your space (this is the same as if you enter the Map and choose to see ‘Sections’ as will be discussed below).

• You can Open any of the Sections to see the full text of the Section.

• You can lay out all the Sections any way you want to, with particular easy to align them horizontally, vertically or by depth, and anything else you prefer, to get a very different view of your document.

On the Importance of Headings. Whether you write primarily on your Mac or in Vision, a key part of getting the most out of Author is to create Headings, rather than just making text bold, to be able to use the Outline and Section views.

• To make a Heading, select the text you want to turn into a Heading, and use the context menu (control or two finger click on Mac, pinch and hold on Vision) and choose ‘Heading’ and the level you want to assign.

• You can also select the text and use the keyboard, with cmd-1 for Heading level one and so on.

Write Outline Sections Map

Map

The Map view is where you can lay out your thoughts, ideas, inspirations, and sources non-linearly to see how they connect and — importantly — how they might not connect, to help you see beyond what your brain present to you. On Vision it’s expanded in-depth giving you ‘literally’ (textually) new dimensions to think & write in.

When you tap ‘Map’ the document will not change (as it does when you go between Write and Outline), any Nodes you have available will instead appear behind your document.

• If you use Author on your Mac, and you have Defined Concepts to view on the Map, you can see them here as well, by tapping ‘Map’ and all the Defined Concepts you created on your Mac will appear in the space behind your document (as opposed to taking up the space of your document as it does on Mac).

• If you don’t use Author on Mac you can Define Concepts from your document in the Write view using the Context menu and Ask AI (choose Define Concepts).

At this point you would likely want to move the main document view (Write/Outline) off to the side (we do not currently have a way for this to be done automatically for you).

Nodes

Your Nodes are Defined Concepts, Sections, Notes & Citations. When you have more than one Defined Concept on your Map and one of them includes the other it it’s definition, once you select it, a line will appear between them. This is much easier to see than describe so I encourage you to play.

• Defined Concepts are core to what the Map in Author is, they are concepts (such as people, places, institutions etc.) which you yourself define. The default is for the Nodes to be ‘Closed’, showing only the term, or name of the concept, such as ‘Chocolate’. When you open them you will see the definition you wrote for this term.

• Sections are based on the Headings in your document, allowing you to quite literally walk around in your document since you can easily arrange them horizontally, vertically or by depth.

• Notes are freeform text. That’s all there is to them. Quick & easy.

• Citations are documents you cite. These are not yet visible in visionOS, only on Mac so far.

Selected Node Interactions

If you Select & Open a node (using the Toolbar or double tapping while looking at it) you will have further options:

• ‘Ask AI’ will give you a series of options to query the selected Node or all the Nodes in your environment.

• ‘All’ which will select all Sections if you had selected a Section, or all the Nodes of the same Category if you selected a Defined Concept.

• ‘Edit’ will open the Edit dialog if you selected a Defined Concept. If you selected a Section it will scroll your Write window to the right heading.

Toolbar

Once you tap ‘Map’ in the toolbar under your document and the Nodes appear in your space, you will also get a Map Toolbar. It features the following commands:

Ask AI Focus [D] Select Add Show [A] Layout Views

When you have selected one or more Nodes you get these commands (New changes to Open):

Ask AI Focus [D] Select Open Show [A] Layout Views

• Ask AI let’s you query AI about the contents in the space.

• Focus hides any node not selected or connected to. This is very powerful to reduce visual complexity. Tap it again to move out of Focus mode or [A] to show All.

• [D] to ‘Deselect’ any and all Nodes.

• Select to select by category, such as ‘People’, ‘Events’ or ‘Sections’ which are based on the headings in your document. You can also select All, and Find documents in this menu.

• Open opens selected Nodes. This is handy in addition to the double-pinch gesture since you can open multiple Nodes at the same time and you don’t risk any slight accidental movement. When Nodes are Open, this turns into Close.

• Add reveals a menu to create a new Node, with options to Define (which will turn the Note into a Defined Concept) or ‘Save’ which will save and exit the dialog with a new Note in your space.

• Show lets you specify what should be shown in the space, also by category and type. Here you can choose to only see Sections for example, allowing you to interact with a different layout of your document with no Nodes distracting you.

• [A] to show ‘All’ nodes.

• Layout where you can choose to configure the selected nodes spatially alphabetically or by time, horizontally, vertically or by depth.

  • Align >

  • Distribute >

• Views to create and access views of your information.

  • Saved Views listed on top.

  • Save View to immediately get a dialog to write the name of a new View to save.

  • Edit Layouts

‍Gestures

• To Select a node, look at it and pinch - like a tap or click.

• To Open a node to see more information, look at it and double pinch - like a tap or click.

• To Move a node, look at it, pinch-and hold and move, then let go. Note that this does not select or deselect.

• To Edit a node, look at it and long-hold-pinch. Note that the dialog to edit it appears on the toolbar, not on the node.

• To Add a Note (to open the Note dialog in Edit mode (for new Note), with cursor active) pinch both hands close together and move them apart, while still pinching. (this is the gesture previously used for Focus) This should feel like you are ‘drawing’ out a new Node in space.

Growing your Maps

You can work on mapping your knowledge on Mac or in Vision when you are authoring a document and that is useful, but let’s be honest, it only gets you so far since you probably won’t want to spend too much time on a knowledge map for just one paper, it’s probably much more useful to build knowledge maps and use them — and re-use them — whenever you want.

This you can do by working on a Map in an Author document and then copying the Defined Concepts from it to a document you are writing. For example, you might be making a large Map over time on the history of technology and use this in a paper you are writing on the history of mobile phones.

This way you’ll retain your large Map which you can keep building and add to new documents.

Adding Context Nodes to your Knowledge Workspace

The first step is in Author on your Mac. Create a Map of your knowledge for a specific topic which you may want to return to this Map over time to refine it and use it as Context in other documents (in other words, a re-usable Concept Map):

• From this document you can go to the ‘Defined’ menu and ‘Copy Defined Concepts’.

• In your new document go to the ‘Defined’ menu and ‘Paste Defined Concepts as Context.’ Choosing ‘Context’ allows for more flexibility later since it tells Author to keep these concepts separate. For example, ‘Sections’ will not be copied across.

• You now have the Map you have been working on added to your new document.

Knowledge Workspace in visionOS

• When you now open your document on Vision Pro all the nodes from your Knowledge Workspace will be available when you hit ‘Map’.

• The Important & Useful part is that the ones you copied across from your Knowledge Workspace are treated as ‘Context’, which you can easily specify if they should be interactable in the Select and Show menus. This means that you a choose to select, for example, all the ‘Persons’ in the space without including the ones which are there there as Context.

Back on Mac

• When you go back to Author on your Mac you can continue to Copy from your Map document into your working document, as well as into new documents.

Settings

Settings allow you to specify themes, font size (for Write view), and more. This is available bottom right in the main document window.

Further Work

Further Work. There is a lot more to do. We agree strongly with McLuhan’s perspective that the medium we use changes us and we need to experience new media to understand it:

• Room.We are working being able to lock the Map view in any given room, so that you can have a spatial ‘memory palace’ for your mapped knowledge. Currently the Map re-centers on wherever you look, which will remain as an option.

• Themes. Because of the powerful rendering technology, it is not plain to define colors, so we have temporarily removed some themes.

• Document Access. We are also working on ways to be able to link to other Author documents in the Map space as well as other information, in order to allow you to nest your knowledge spaces.

• Speech. We are also looking into how we can best allow for speech interactions with the environment, which is somewhat complicated by energy use if constantly on, along with concerns of false readings and how to both make sure Author can understand the user and the user understand Author’s capabilities. We are therefore looking into some sort of intuitive ‘toggle’ for voice, such as maybe tapping one’s wrist and a panel appearing showing all the valid commands if required (directly inspired by Doug Engelbart’s NLS interactions).

• Pictures. Photographs will be possible to have available in the space, both as extracts from images in the document and as related to the Defined Concepts, such as ‘Persons’. Issues with this are both technical, since they take resources to render and interface wise, since pictures of people are often in very different styles so can become quite messy when viewed in large numbers. Portraits of historical Western thinkers are often available as beautiful oil paintings — people from more recent periods not so much. We may therefore use AI renderings to present portraits in consistent styles, or user the means through which make the environment more visual.

• AI. Ask AI is already in Author, both in Write and Map views, though in very limited ways. Professor David Millard suggested giving the AI the same capabilities as the user in the environment so as to allow for user commands to be something like “put all the people who live in the UK in a horizontal layout at the back” and so on.

Why This Matters

We are the only generation who will be the first who can reliably work in high quality headsets — the generations before us could only experience Extended Reality at high enough quality to interact with text in labs, or at leisure with lower quality headsets which were not optimal for text.

Future generations will have the technical capabilities to build and use Extended Reality headsets at phenomenal quality, at very low user hassle in terms of weight and battery, at affordable cost.

Whereas previous generations were mostly confined to dream about what could be, future generations will be confined to try to dream about — what else could be — being prejudiced by what is, making imagining different realities a real challenge, much like it has been for us with traditional flat & framed displays which became locked-in as the Graphical User Interface with the model of desktop, icons, context menus and point and click being the way ‘real’ computers work, and even more confined within the tap interaction on mobile devices.

The task then falls on those of us who are excited by the current opportunity (and not just a little bit intimated by it all) to consider how to make working in Headsets actually useful, and to expand the dialog into as many directions for how it can be useful, once we make real progress. Extended Reality is too much of a potential for augmenting the human mind to be stuck in only one (commercially developed) paradigm interaction.

The key future development we are focused on is simple making working in a headset useful. We fully acknowledge that we are not there yet in a really meaningful way. The way we are working towards this though is from two directions with Author:

1. Your own information. First of all, to make sure you have access to your own, real-life information effortlessly, when working in the headset, and that the work you do there will be available outside in traditional flat & framed environments. creating the full system on Apple platforms goes a long way to solve this, with iCloud as a glue.

2. Useful Interactions. It is only by building and experiencing what working spatially is that we can develop deeper understanding of what capabilities will be useful and how they should be made available to the user — what interfaces are appropriate for which tasks and in what way.

The result of the future developments will hopefully be that you can really expand your knowledge interactions into a true Knowledge Space

Widening the Dialog. To address the importance of widening the potential of interactions I also host an annual symposium on The Future of Text, I have published 6 collections of articles from our community and I have hosted over 600 Open Office Hours 4:30PM Mondays, all of which you can see at The Future of Text and which I warmly invite you to join the dialog on. My work also involves championing robust and rich metadata interchange to allow for a community of tools to be developed, based on the visual-metadata approach.

Augmentation Framework. It’s not enough to only develop a tool, the technical information infrastructure needs to be developed to support the dialog and fostering human interaction to develop more of a dialog of not only how to do this by what should be done. For those who are familiar with the work of my mentor Doug Engelbart, this will be obvious. If not, I encourage you to read up on his work and philosophy, perhaps starting with his 1962 paper Augmenting Human Intellect.

Simply, I believe that spatial text can augment thinking itself and that this is important, too important to only leave to market forces.

Thank you for being a part of this journey.

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Frode A. Hegland, PhD
Wimbledon, UK, Summer ‘26

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