Immersion in the current form of the document occurs within the boundaries of a rectangular screen. Can we not broaden the notion of immersion to expand beyond the boundaries of a screen to the overall environment including architectonic space, sense of enclosure, backdrops in physical space, environmental lightening and audio systems, aroma effects. Building such a rich presentation will advance expressive capabilities of the digital document

Contemporary multimedia technology has undoubtedly increased the screen based display space and provided users with quick access to images and sound. While there is rich output coming from system to user, input between user to system is keyboard and mouse based and text based. What if, instead of text-based retrieval and button pushing, the learner could interact through expressive gestures? Couldn't interacting through gestures allow the learner to access pictures through pictures, sound through sound. Couldn't we explore 'multimedia' search engines?

The world's music, art traditions have shown us the rich forms of expression that result from the expression of the hands, the value of hand skills and hand literacy. Yet our modern digital tools have been designed to eliminate hand skills, the engagement with the content through the hands. Of the hundreds of hand gesture positions that are possible, interactions with digital documents become reduced to point and click and button pushing. Couldn't we employ gestures to provide kinaesthetic forms of interaction with digital content? In addition, can we not explore the relation between the forms of hand held interface in response to the dimensions and spaces created by the hand and body? Could we not study and incorporate the dimensions of texture and touch in the design of hand held interfaces?

Early efforts of computing focused on emulating the properties of paper media, .e., creating digital screen design based presentation models. While designers captured the gross aspects of paper medium in digital media the subtler aspects of paper interaction were ignored - i.e., how the paper document, one that could support fluid, social learning interactions.

Therefore, can we not explore bridges between the traditional media and computing display media?

Explorations of these questions lead us to a vision of the living document experience that incorporates spatial dimensions and the body in the act of communication.