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Palmer Luckey, the creator of Oculus, has created a virtual reality headset that intentionally kills people.
Called “NerveGear,” the system aims to tightly link people’s virtual lives with their real lives, ending both at the same time.
If someone dies in a game or VR experience while wearing the headset, they will die in real life at the same time, Luckey said.
It does this by detecting the specific shade of red it shows when a person dies, meaning developers could integrate the system easily. Once red appears, three explosive modules detonate, “instantly destroying the user’s brain.”
Mr Luckey said the system is still unfinished. Its goal is to make it impossible to remove or destroy the headset so that people are trapped in virtual reality.
And because of design limitations and the danger that it could fail and kill people at the wrong time, he hasn’t tried it himself yet, he said in a blog post announcing the new system.
Luckey said that while the technology at this point is “just a piece of office art,” it’s intended to be thought-provoking about game design. But he also said that it seems to be the first time that a system of this type has been created, and “it won’t be the last”.
“The idea of tying your real life to your virtual avatar has always fascinated me: you instantly raise the stakes to the highest level and force people to fundamentally rethink how they interact with the virtual world and the players within it.” Luckey wrote. the blog post announcing the ‘NerveGear’.
“Augmented graphics can make a game seem more real, but only the threat of dire consequences can make a game seem real to you and everyone else in the game. This is one area of video game mechanics which has never been explored, despite the long history of real-world sports revolving around similar bets.”
The technology was created to commemorate the events of the Sword Art Online anime, and was announced on the date that similar fictional technology is created in that game, and the team’s name is taken from this In SAO, players are placed in a virtual dungeon and must fight their way out, but if they are unsuccessful, they die in real life.
Mr Luckey is most famous for creating Oculus, the virtual reality company, and its first headset. The company was bought by Meta, then Facebook, in 2014, and the two have been gradually integrated.
He left the company in 2017 amid criticism of his pro-Trump political views, though Facebook has always denied that was the reason Luckey was fired.
Since then, Luckey has continued his interest in virtual reality, but also focusing on defense technologies. In his blog post, Mr. Luckey mentioned that NerveGear was created with “explosive charge modules that I regularly use for a different project,” which may be related to this work.