The idea that dying in a video game or simulation could cause your death in real life is a common trope that has appeared in dozens of fictional works over the past few decades. But now Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey has made the idea a reality. On his personal blog, Luckey writes about a new VR headset he’s designed that uses three built-in explosive charges, mounted above the forehead, that can “instantly destroy the user’s brain.” The deadly blast is triggered via “a narrow-band photosensor that can detect when the screen flashes red at a certain frequency,” Luckey writes, making it easy to trigger during a “Game Over” screen. Enlarge / John Carmack (left) poses with Oculus founder Palmer Luckey (center) and other members of the Oculus team. Oculus VR To be clear, Luckey says his deadly headset – which looks like a modified Meta Quest Pro in pictures – is “at this point… just a piece of desk art, a thoughtful reminder of uncharted avenues in game design.” . But at the same time, Luckey writes that “the idea of ​​connecting your real life with your virtual avatar has always fascinated me — you immediately raise the stakes to the maximum level and force people to fundamentally rethink how they interact with the virtual world and the players inside this”. Luckey links this fascination with Sword Art Online (SAO), a series of Japanese novels (and spinoff anime, video games, etc.) about a virtual reality MMORPG of the same name. In this fiction, November 6, 2022 marks the day thousands of SAO players are trapped in their NerveGear headsets and threatened with death via a hidden microwave generator if they die in-game (or if they attempt to remove or hack the headsets). The anime Sword Art Online was just airing when the first Oculus Rift Development Kit launched on Kickstarter in 2012, helping to drive what Luckey calls “tremendous otaku enthusiasm for Oculus, especially in Japan, which quickly became the 2nd largest market us”. He says that “literally thousands” of fans have contacted him over the year about Sword Art Online, asking, “When are you going to make the NerveGear [headset] real?!”

History of consequences

More than realistic graphics, Luckey writes that “only the threat of dire consequences can make a game feel real to you.” He likens these consequences to a “long history of real-world sports revolving around similar bets,” though it’s important to remember that most sports injuries fall short of instant death. Advertising
But while Luckey writes that this is “an area of ​​video game engineering that’s never been explored,” that’s not strictly true. In 2001, the PainStation art installation threatened players who lost a game of Pong with “sensations like heat, punches 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 participants received reinforcing but non-lethal electric shocks corresponding to the injuries sustained by their on-screen idols.” Enlarge / These armbands deliver instant pain to anyone hit in 2001’s “Tekken Torture Tournament.” At the other end of the simulated pain equation, last year the Food and Drug Administration approved a virtual reality pain management system that uses “established behavioral therapy principles intended to address the physiological symptoms of pain and aid in pain relief through a treatment program skills’. In any case, Luckey cites “a huge variety of failures that could happen and kill the user at the wrong time” in explaining why he “hasn’t been able to really use” his deadly new headset. But the project shows that Luckey still has a deep interest in virtual reality, more than five years after he was fired from Oculus parent company Facebook (now Meta) amid controversy over political donations. In the intervening years, Luckey’s professional life has largely centered on military technology startup Anduril. In a personal blog post in April, however, he wrote that Oculus’ 10th anniversary year was “the right time to finally reveal some VR technologies that I haven’t been able to talk about for various reasons.” We’re guessing that deadly handset wasn’t what he meant by it, but it’s hard to know for sure…