AR Raku Headsets

Augmented and virtual reality will impact every aspect of our lives the way the internet and the cellphone already have. The AR Raku Headsets are part of a massive timeline of more than seventy sculptures that trace the development of this technology over the last fifty years.

The history of the technology is hidden in plain sight. Most people who use a VR headset today have no idea that the lineage stretches back to Ivan Sutherland's Sword of Damocles in 1968, through the SEGA VR, the Virtual Boy, the View-Master, Google Cardboard, the Oculus DK1 and DK2, the HTC Vive, the Magic Leap One, Microsoft Hololens, the StarVR, and on. Each is its own moment in the conversation between the human face and the digital image.

Each sculpture in the timeline is a portrait of a human head wearing a specific headset, hand-built in clay and raku-fired. Raku is a Japanese low-fire process that produces metallic, unpredictable, slightly otherworldly finishes. The pieces look ancient and futuristic at the same time, which is the point.

Selected sculptures from the timeline have been shown at The Tech Interactive (formerly The Tech Museum of Innovation) in San Jose, at TEDx Jackson Hole, and at Presence at the District Gallery in Los Angeles in 2015. The full timeline is intended to live in a public collection eventually.

“A fifty-year timeline of the human face meeting the digital image.”