Palmer Luckey Designs a VR Headset That Can Kill You In Real Time

In recent decades, scores of fictional works have used the theme that dying in a computer game or simulation could result in your death in real life. However, Palmer Luckey, a co-founder of Oculus, has now brought the idea to life. On his own blog, Luckey describes a new VR headset that he has created, which uses three embedded explosive charges that are placed above the user's forehead and can "instantly destroy the user's brain. According to Luckey, “the deadly explosion is set off by a narrow-band photo sensor that can detect when the screen flashes red at a precise frequency, making it simple to activate during a "Game Over" screen.” [caption id="attachment_60247" align="aligncenter" width="530"] Oculus founder Palmer Luckey (center) and other members of the Oculus team.[/caption] To be clear, Luckey claims that his lethal headset—which resembles a modified Meta Quest Pro in images—is "at this time... merely a piece of office art, a thought-provoking reminder of untapped options in game design." However, Luckey also states that "the concept of connecting your actual life to your virtual avatar has always fascinated me—you suddenly increase the stakes to the utmost degree and drive people to radically rethink how they interact with the virtual world and the individuals inside it." The Sword Art Online (SAO) series of Japanese books (and related anime, video games, etc.) about a virtual reality MMORPG with the same name is Luckey's connection to this interest. Thousands of SAO players are imprisoned in their NerveGear headsets on November 6, 2022, and are threatened with death by a concealed microwave generator if they lose the game on that day (or if they try to remove or tamper with the headset). When the initial Oculus Rift Development Kit debuted on Kickstarter in 2012, the anime Sword Art Online had just begun to air. This contributed to the "huge otaku enthusiasm" for Oculus, according to Luckey, "particularly in Japan, which rapidly became our 2nd largest market."  Upon asking when he would make the NerveGear [headset] actual, he claims that "literally thousands" of fans had contacted him over the course of the year concerning Sword Art Online. Consequences in the past Luckey claims that, in addition to realistic graphics, "only the prospect of serious repercussions can make a game feel real to you." He compares these outcomes to a "long history of real-world sports revolving around similar stakes," but it's crucial to keep in mind that most sports injuries don't result in immediate death. [caption id="attachment_60253" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Those armbands deliver instant pain to anyone who got hit in 2001's "Tekken Torture Tournament."[/caption] Luckey claims that this is "a region of video game mechanics that has never been explored," although that isn't exactly accurate. According to Wired, the PainStation art piece from 2001 threatened Pong losers with "sensations like heat, blows, and electroshocks of increasing duration." The "Tekken Torture Tournament" was a video game-based competition that year in which "32 volunteer competitors received bracing but non-lethal electrical shocks in connection to the injuries incurred by their on-screen avatars." Luckey claims that this is "a region of video game mechanics that has never been explored," although that isn't exactly accurate. Oculus founder, however, cites "a tremendous range of malfunctions that may occur and kill the user at the wrong time" as the reason he "hasn't gotten up the balls to really deploy" his lethal new headset. However, the initiative demonstrates that, more than five years after being sacked by Oculus parent company Facebook (now Meta) because of controversies over political donations, Luckey continues to have a keen interest in virtual reality. Since then, Luckey has devoted much of his professional energy to his military technology business Anduril. The year of the 10th anniversary of the birth of Oculus, however, was "the appropriate time to finally expose some VR technologies I haven't been able to talk about for a number of reasons," he wrote in an April post on his personal blog. Though it's difficult to be certain, we assume he didn't mean this lethal headset.