IDSA member Branko Lukic isn’t wasting any time. Just months after the first-of-its-kind Oculus Rift won an IDSA International Design Excellence Award in August 2016—Lukic began trying to make virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets as comfortable as possible.
Fast Company’s Mark Wilson reports that since April 2017, Lukic and his studio Nonobject in Palo Alto, CA have taken on the challenge as an unpaid side project called Airhead “for their own amusement.” They hope to improve the physical comfort, increase social acceptance and rethink the intuitiveness of VR and AR headsets.
“As we look around, we see our industry is doing what it does time and time again. It gets into tech gadgets driven by technology, not thinking about the human,” Lukic tells Fast Company. “A ‘wearable’ is not just something you strap on your head. This project attempts to open the avenues, and inspire the industry, to leap forward farther than we have today.”
Writes Wilson, “Nonobject shared its designs exclusively with Co.Design in the hope that the industry would steal these open-source ideas and move AR and VR forward. Note that they are not just concepts and renderings, but prototyped headset and controller bodies that can accommodate the Oculus spec. In other words, these ideas aren’t mere fantasy. They could all be feasibly mass-produced soon, if not tomorrow.”