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Palmer Luckey, the creator of Oculus VR and the Oculus Rift, has shown his most recent virtual reality (VR) masterpiece: a headset that ensures that if you die in the game, you also die in real life.
In a blog post, Luckey stated that he was halfway through developing his headset, NerveGear, specifically the portion that will kill the gamer.
In essence, the headset is a standard VR headset connected to three explosive charges. When the player dies in a video game they are playing, the charges, which are equipped with a photosensor, are programmed to go off and kill them (hint: maybe choose Animal Crossing rather than Dark Souls). Game designers would have to incorporate a mechanism that would cause the explosives to detonate when the screen flashes red at a particular frequency in order to make the game playable.
If you die in the game, you die in real life if you wear the headset that Oculus founder Palmer Luckey created in honor of Sword Art Online. pic.twitter.com/maCFMroD5B
— IGN (@IGN) November 8, 2022
The idea of connecting your actual life to your virtual identity has always intrigued Luckey because it “instantly raises the stakes to the highest degree and forces individuals to radically rethink how they interact with the virtual world and the players inside it.”
“Only the possibility of terrible repercussions may make a game feel real to you and everyone else in the game. Enhanced graphics may make a game appear more realistic. Despite the long history of real-world sports centered around comparable stakes, this area of videogame mechanics has never been investigated.”
Luckey claims he hasn’t yet “got up the balls” to use the device, which he designed as a parody of the book and anime series Sword Art Online, which has a similar technological theme.
He added that it isn’t yet finished and said: “Of course, this isn’t a perfect system. I have ideas for an anti-tamper device that, like NerveGear, will prevent the headset from being removed or damaged.”
The headset is “at this point,” according to Luckey, merely a piece of art, but it’s also the first VR device he’s aware of outside of fiction that has the potential to kill the user.
He wrote, “It won’t be the last, meet you in the Metaverse.
