This isn’t one of them. This is where I trace the timeline of my work in AR to gain perspective and archive it in collective memory, free from character limits or the pressure to grab attention.
Introduction to AR
My fascination with AR began in 2016, when I first put on a Microsoft HoloLens at Gensler’s Los Angeles office. I had just arrived in the U.S. from Pakistan to study at Bennington College, searching for a new technological medium to build a lifelong creative career in.
While VR and AI were intriguing, it was AR that captured my imagination. The virtual and physical colliding felt both conceptually rich and experientially magical.
My HoloLens
I was convinced that headsets were the inevitable future of AR and that phones would soon be obsolete. After a summer of collecting prize money from hackathon wins, I finally had enough to purchase a HoloLens developer kit.
The device felt like it had arrived from the future: transparent lenses, lidar sensors, and gestural and voice input. It was so prohibitively expensive that only large firms could justify it for enterprise use. I was likely one of the only students using it purely as a creative tool.
Spells & Experiments
For my first experiment I programmed the HoloLens to trigger Harry Potter spells using voice commands and gestures, casting them with a wand I’d made from a tree branch. A video of the experience quickly went viral, racking up millions of views on Facebook and earning coverage from outlets like The Telegraph.
Simulation & Personal
At Bennington College, I began shaping my curriculum around themes of simulation, perception, and hyperreality. My professors, specifically Robert Ransick and Karthik Pandian, challenged me to read Deleuze, Barthes, and Baudrillard. Through those conversations, I began to understand how rare it was for someone with my background to be creatively exploring a medium as nascent and consequential as AR.
My next project, Holograms from Syria, was inspired by Martha Rosler’s work, which juxtaposed images from the Vietnam War with interior design magazines to create unsettling contrasts. I applied the same logic to Augmented Reality, cutting out images from the war in Syria and placing them into everyday locations across the U.S.
Terminal 3
Terminal 3 was the first AR project to premiere at a major film festival, debuting at Tribeca in 2018 to critical acclaim. I produced it through 1RIC, the studio I formed with friends from college, including Jack Gerrard, who later became Jadu’s first CTO.
The idea of bringing AR to film festivals came up after Holograms from Syria caught the attention of Hussain Currimboy, then a Sundance curator. He introduced me to Rene Pinnel, who joined as executive producer and helped secure funding. The project marked my first time working with volumetric video, supported by Depthkit, and was built in Unity, which not only backed the project but later launched a grant program inspired by it.
In the experience, viewers wore a HoloLens and entered a replica of a U.S. Customs screening room, where they interrogated a hologram of a Muslim traveler using voice commands. The branching dialogue, based on real interviews with people who had faced this kind of screening, led to a final decision to allow entry or not. The viewer then turned a corner to meet the real person behind the hologram.
Inspired by my own FBI interrogation, Terminal 3 was designed to confront bias, identity, and systemic power through an immersive, uncomfortable encounter. The project went on to tour internationally, including a public exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London.
A Jester’s Tale
1RIC’s next project, A Jester’s Tale, was created for the newly released Magic Leap headset. It built on the voice-based conversation format introduced in Terminal 3, placing the viewer inside a reverse Turing test, an elaborate CAPTCHA designed to prove their humanity to an AI through surreal, performative interactions in AR.
The project gave me the opportunity to collaborate with YouTube pop star Poppy, who played the Rat Queen, the final form of the shape-shifting AI. It was also my second time working with producer Jake Sally, who was at RYOT at the time and would later join Jadu as COO.
A Jester’s Tale premiered at Sundance in 2019 and was later featured at the MIT Open Documentary Lab and the Future of Storytelling Summit.
Career Day and Serena Williams
I moved to Los Angeles after graduating in the summer of 2019 and was immediately commissioned by Verizon to create an educational AR experience in the format of Terminal 3, this time featuring Serena Williams.
I interviewed Serena while she was recorded with 106 cameras to produce a photorealistic volumetric hologram. We built a branching conversation on the HoloLens 2, which was generously provided by its inventor, Alex Kipman.
The final experience was deployed in over 200 schools across the U.S. as a virtual Career Day, giving students a chance to engage directly with Serena in augmented reality.
Birth of Jadu
I realized headset adoption would take time, and the best way to reach a real audience was through mobile phones. Instead of continuing to build one-off projects for festivals, it felt time to create a single, evolving experience that could reach millions.
We started Jadu to bring AR to phones, not through location-based mechanics like Pokémon Go, but through the kind of expressive, interactive AR we had built on headsets.
Jadu Holograms
The first version of the Jadu app launched during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing people to perform with holograms of musicians in AR. With touring shut down and artists stuck at home, we invited them into the Metastage studio to capture performances that fans could interact with on their phones. We worked with artists like Pussy Riot, Vic Mensa, and KCamp, and the app quickly went viral on TikTok, reaching tens of millions of views.
We also created Curse of Calypso with Palaye Royale, blending holograms, music, and spatial storytelling into one of the most ambitious AR experiences built for mobile. The momentum led to a major collaboration with Lil Nas X, culminating in an interactive AR performance of his Billboard #1 song Montero (Call Me By Your Name).
Panic Attack
In 2021 I directed my first and only music video, for Pussy Riot’s Panic Attack. Nadya and I had become friends through Jadu, after collaborating on holograms. The video was commissioned by Acronym and created using our volumetric capture technology to turn Nadya into a hologram, which we placed into surreal virtual worlds designed by Ruben Fro, who later became Jadu’s Director of Cinematics.
We released the video in four parts as NFTs during the early rise of Web3. It sold for 178 ETH, worth around $500,000 at the time, making it the most expensive music video ever sold. That moment opened my eyes to NFTs as a new way to fund experimental art and technology that didn’t yet fit into existing business models.
Jadu Jetpacks
Web3 in 2021 had a rare kind of energy. Despite the noise and obvious scams, there was a real sense of possibility—a vision of a shared virtual network where game worlds built by different teams could overlap, as long as players owned the characters and items themselves. In a landscape where the future was increasingly being shaped by a few dominant tech companies, the idea of a new network with its own rules and culture felt deeply compelling to me.
We entered the space with our first collection of game items: Jadu Jetpacks. These voxel jetpacks could be used in our AR app to fly avatars from other ecosystems that players already owned. We posted videos of Meebits flying in AR, and they spread quickly on X. The idea of digital items that could be experienced in the real world struck a nerve. I didn’t realize how deeply until mint day, when all 1,111 jetpacks sold out before my test transaction even went through.
A vibrant secondary market followed almost instantly, fueled by clips of jetpacks flying in streets, fields, and living rooms around the world.