The World Inside the Goggles: Martin Haake’s Illustration for Lufthansa

The promise of somewhere extraordinary, compressed into a plastic frame and pressed against someone’s eyes at 35,000 feet. The concept is elegant in its literalness but Martin Haake transforms it into something genuinely enchanting and his influences explain a great deal about why.

Haake has cited outsider artists including Bill Traylor, Howard Finster and Martin Ramirez as foundational to his thinking. These are makers who worked outside the art establishment, often with limited materials and no formal training, producing images with imaginative intensity. He describes the appeal directly: their images are “imperfect, full of mistakes, naive and therefore charming.” Haake actively courts that imperfection in his work. His images feel like they’ve been assembled with love.

In his illustration for Lufthansa’s feature on extended reality inflight entertainment, the VR goggles become a frame within the frame. The world inside is hand-textured, warm, and slightly naive, closer to a vintage travel poster than a rendered digital environment. This contrast between the clinical white headset and the exuberant scene it contains makes a quiet argument about what travel is actually for. That feeling of stepping into a world that is bigger and warmer and more alive than the one you left behind.