Born in 1938 in Hastings, Nebraska, Ivan E. Sutherland grew up in a world shaped by war, machines, and technological dreams. From a young age, he questioned the relationship between human thought and mechanical computation. In 1963, following his research at MIT, he developed Sketchpad, a revolutionary program that allowed users to draw directly on a screen using a light pen—the first interactive graphical interface. In 1965, his text The Ultimate Display laid the foundation for a vision of the future where computers could simulate an entire reality—a total perceptual utopia. Sutherland didn’t just want to see the world: he sought to rebuild it.
In 1968, Ivan Sutherland, together with his student Bob Sproull, created the first-ever virtual reality headset, known as the Sword of Damocles. Suspended from the ceiling, heavy, and mounted on the user’s head, this rudimentary device projected a wireframe 3D grid into the field of vision. At that time, the idea of entering an artificial world through the eyes belonged to the realm of science fiction. Yet Sutherland took it seriously: if the retina could be deceived, then reality could be reprogrammed. The headset became a threshold. Behind the technical invention, a vision emerged: that of a shared mental space where the visible becomes malleable. Illusion becomes raw material.