The Discover Jesus App: Status 2023 Aug
Gary Tonge has again exceeded expectations with his skill at bringing the individuals from Part IV of the book to life.
Discover Jesus Updates
By Mike Robinson
SHARING THE APP AT THE PARLIAMENT
At the time of this writing, we are actively sharing an early version of our Discover Jesus app with attendees of the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago from August 14-18, 2023. This is a large event that attracts participants from more than 200 diverse religious, indigenous, and secular beliefs and from more than 80 nations.
The Parliament event follows our first sharing of the app with attendees at the Urantia Book International Conference in Chicago last month from July 24-28. Similar to that event, we invite attendees to engage with the app using a laptop at the Center for Unity booth and to provide feedback for our internal team to make continuous improvements.
It’s been such an exciting time as we gather positive feedback from users of the beta version of the app and their enthusiasm for our efforts to publish a Wikipedia-style interactive experience based on Part IV of The Urantia Book.
One of the main pieces of feedback we received at the International Conference was how amazing the artwork was in the images that were created for each essay. Gary Tonge has again exceeded expectations with his skill at bringing the individuals from Part IV of the book to life in ways that help us connect to each unique personality. It was such a treat to watch people stop and stare at the images on screen and share their love for them.
DEVELOPMENT PROGRESS
At a high level, we are committed to releasing the app in the public domain by the end of 2023! This means that the general public will be able to find the app via Google and other search engines, as well as the beginning of our promotion of the app and its availability. (Gabriel noted that since this is a web app, all the content will be scraped by search engines and whoever collects data to train new AI models. We are seeding new content based on The Urantia Book into Google's algorithm and future versions of OpenAI's ChatGPT).
Our most recent milestone was launching a search toolbar on the app to make the content more accessible and targeted based on each user’s interests. From here, we plan to focus on implementing a Journey mode that will be used for longer essays to make the content more interactive. After that, we will shift our focus to developing a mobile-friendly version of the app for use on smartphones and tablets.
As we continue to develop new essays and images, we are approximately 15-20% of the way to our goal of approximately 700 total articles. Much of our work lies ahead!
CREATIVE WRITING
The writing team has been working hard in preparation for these two public outings for conference attendees to use the app. In addition to Lisa C. who was announced as an addition in our last update, Gregg T. and Tom R. have also joined the team. Welcome, Gregg and Tom!
We are prioritizing the writer’s work to complete some of the most commonly referenced articles first. As a reminder, each essay represents an original new exposition of a Person, Group, Relationship, Event, Location, or Topic from part IV of The Urantia Book.
MEDIA CURATION
Gary has continued to paint for the app and is using the Midjourney AI program to produce a first draft and then completes the work himself. As mentioned above, the images created for our first beta version of Discover Jesus that we displayed at the International Conference last month truly impressed attendees and was our biggest “wow” factor from those who visited our booth.
We are so appreciative of Gary and his amazing work!
WE NEED YOUR HELP
As you can imagine, this is a huge project and we have a team of enthusiastic Urantia students working on it. Lisa is creating the pages, functionality, and the look and feel of the Discover Jesus. Fraser is developing the app to work on smartphones, tablets, and computers in both Apple and Android.
Please help us with a $25/month donation. Our goal is to reach 500 donors to sustain the development of the app!
Look for the Contribute button at the top of this page, or donate below.
Thank you!
