Robust metadata in multiple environments

Abstract

We live in a time of wondrous technologies, but plain old academic articles remain hamstrung by clinging to the affordances of the paper media of the past. The affordances offered by digital media are not present in any depth; there is simply copy and paste and blue hyperlinks. The Visual-Meta approach makes even basic PDF documents contain rich metadata, which allows them to be active rather than passive knowledge components, and this can be done in any media in which the document can be rendered. This paper presents Visual-Meta and explains what it is, what the basic benefits are, and how it can augment knowledge in augmented environments such as AR/VR, often today referred to as the 'metaverse'.