Eye is an extended reality (XR) installation developed in 2014, in the early stages of consumer-accessible virtual reality. Created for and presented at TADAEX (Tehran Annual Digital Art Exhibition) in Tehran, Iran, the work explores the tension between perception and mediation, posing questions about embodiment, illusion, and technological vision. In a moment when VR was still nascent, Eye asked whether what we see through machines is is real, and whether it matters if it is, as we increasingly inhabit the in-between space of digital-physical identity.

At the heart of Eye is a simple optical illusion. A 360-degree video feed of the gallery space, captured through a parabolic lens attached to a video camera, was unwrapped in real time using a GLSL shader and fed to an Oculus Rift DK2 headset. In the real space of the gallery and abstract pattern, an endless flag, was fragmented into physical shards: painted on foam board, cut apart, and suspended at varying depths throughout the installation space. While the VR headset presented the illusion of a seamless panoramic image, the physical room was filled with these scattered fragments. When viewed without other present in the space, the illusion was near-complete; the pattern that was fragmented in the gallery became whole and seamless, but as other visitors moved through the space, their bodies interrupted the image, warping the virtual scene and collapsing the boundary between physical and digital perception.

Eye was one of the earliest real-time XR installations to be shown publicly, and it remains a critical exploration of how illusion and embodiment intersect. The work presents the fragility of mediated experience and the constructed nature of digital reality. It suggests that perception is always contingent, shaped not only by technology, but by context, presence, and proximity. In doing so, Eye points to the unresolved tensions of virtual experiences and raises questions about our complicity in becoming virtual selves.