The Oculus co-founder makes a VR headset that can literally kill you

The idea that dying in a video game or simulation could cause your death in real life is a common expression that has appeared in dozens of works of fiction over the past several decades. Now, however, Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey has made the concept a reality.

On his personal blog, Luckey writes about a new VR headset he designed that uses three embedded explosive charges placed over the forehead that “can instantly destroy the user’s brain”. The deadly blast is triggered via “a narrow-bandwidth photosensor that can detect when the screen is flashing red at a specific rate,” Luckey writes, making it easy to get going during a “game over” screen.

To be clear, Luckey says his lethal headset — which looks like a modified Meta Quest Pro in pictures — “at this point…is just a piece of office art, a thought-provoking reminder of uncharted avenues in game design.” At the same time, however, Luckey writes that “the idea of ​​tying your real life to your virtual avatar has always intrigued me – you instantly up the ante to the maximum level and force people to fundamentally rethink how they interact with the virtual world.” interact and the players in it.”

Luckey builds on this fascination Sword Art Online (SAO), a series of Japanese novels (and anime spinoffs, video games, etc.) about a virtual reality MMORPG of the same name. In this fiction, November 6, 2022 marks the day when thousands of SAO Players are trapped in their NerveGear headsets and face death threats via a hidden microwave generator if they die in-game (or if they attempt to remove or tamper with the headset).

That Sword Art Online Anime was airing when the first Oculus Rift development kit was released on Kickstarter in 2012, which helped fuel what Luckey called “massive otaku enthusiasm for Oculus, particularly in Japan, which has quickly become our second largest market.” designated. He says “literally thousands” of fans have contacted him over the year Sword Art Onlineand asked, “When are you going to make the NerveGear [headset] real?!”

A history of consequences

More than just realistic graphics, Luckey writes that “only the threat of serious consequences can make a game feel real to you.” He likens such episodes to “a long history of real-world sport involving similar stakes spins,” although it’s important to remember that most sports injuries fall far short of instant death.

But while Luckey writes that this is “an area of ​​video game mechanics that has never been explored,” that’s not entirely true. In 2001, the PainStation art installation threatened players who lost a game pong with “sensations of heat, blows, and electric shocks of varying duration,” as Wired described it. That same year, the “Tekken Torture Tournament” featured a fighting game competition in which “32 willing contestants received powerful but non-lethal electric shocks equivalent to the injuries sustained by their on-screen avatars.”

At the other end of the simulated pain equation last year was the Food and drug management approved a virtual reality pain management system that uses “established principles of behavioral therapy aimed at addressing the physiological symptoms of pain and supporting pain relief through a competency-based treatment program.”

In any case, Luckey cites “a variety of bugs that could pop up and kill the user at the wrong time” to explain why he “didn’t have the balls to actually use his deadly new headset.” Still, the project shows that more than five years after being fired by Oculus parent company Facebook (now Meta), Luckey still harbors a keen interest in virtual reality amid controversy over political donations.

In the years since, Luckey’s professional life has been largely focused on his military technology startup Anduril. However, in a personal blog post in April, he wrote that the year of Oculus’ 10th anniversary was “the right time to finally introduce some VR technologies that I haven’t been able to talk about for various reasons.”

We suspect that deadly headset wasn’t what he meant by that, but it’s hard to know for sure…