Someone took SAO a little too seriously...
The co-founder of Oculus, Palmer Luckey, has designed a headset that can quite literally kill you in real life if you die in a video game.
Luckey wrote about the new VR headset over on his personal blog, saying that the headset has three embedded explosive charges that are planted right above the forehead. They can “instantly destroy the brain of the user.” The explosion is triggered via “a narrow-band photosensor that can detect when the screen flashes red at a specific frequency.” So, if your screen flashes “Game Over,” then it’s literally game over for you.
However, Lucky did say that the fatal headset is “at this point…just a piece of office art, a thought-provoking reminder of unexplored avenues in game design.”
Still, Luckey wrote that “the idea of tying your real life to your virtual avatar has always fascinated me–you instantly raise the stakes to the maximum level and force people to fundamentally rethink how they interact with the virtual world and the players inside it.”
Luckey did relate his headset to the fascination behind Sword Art Online, a popular anime about a teen who gets stuck inside of a virtual reality MMORPG and will die in real life if he dies in the game. When the anime began airing back in 2012, the Oculus Rift Development Kit had launched on Kickstarter.
Luckey said that Sword Art Online fans have reached out to him, asking when he’d make “the NerveGear real.”
To Luckey, “only the threat of serious consequences can make a game feel real to you.” He likened this to the idea of sports “revolving around similar stakes.” Still, unless we’re talking about ancient times, most sports nowadays don’t equate to death.
Although Luckey said that the fatal headset is “an area of video game mechanics that has never been explored,” there have been prior instances of companies creating games around similar stakes–stopping short of being fatal, however. For example, back in 2001, the PainStation art installation would deliver “sensations such as heat, punches and electroshocks of varying duration” to players who lost a game of Pong.
Still, Luckey says that he has “not worked up the [courage] to actually use” the headset, stating that “a huge variety of failures…could occur and kill the user at the wrong time.”
Luckey is currently working on a military tech startup called Anduril. He was fired from Meta a little over five years ago after controversies arose surrounding his political donations.
In terms of the headset, let’s just hope it never becomes a commercial item. I can’t imagine playing a VR version of Elden Ring (if that ever becomes a thing) would be exciting on that.
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Zainah Yousef
Zainah Yousef is the author of The Fallen Age Saga and specializes in gaming, social media advice, and reviews. She's been writing all her life and she probably won't stop anytime soon.
