Luckey No, this is not a headline that reflects Mark Zuckerberg going completely insane in pursuit of the afterlife. Rather, we’re talking about Palmer Luckey, the original founder of Oculus VR who sold his company to Facebook and has been working primarily on national defense technology since his retirement. Even though it had nothing to do with Zuckerberg’s waning metamorphosis ambitions, that doesn’t mean he isn’t still doing weird, and in this case, really crazy things with VR. Luckey has now built a custom VR headset that he claims will kill a player if they die in a video game. Like, literally. Will kill you. Describing the headset on his blog, Luckey details how he says he built a “die in game, die in real life” Sword Art Online headset. In this series, players are trapped in a giant, immersive VR combat card where if they die in the game, it will actually kill them, since they are stuck in “NerveGear” technology and must find a way to win or escape. Luckey’s version of this idea is a virtual reality headset fitted with charges that will explode “destroying the user’s brain” if they activate the “proper game” screen. Nerve tool SAO Luckey laments that he’s only halfway to designing the true “NerveGear”, Sword Art Online’s technology: “The good news is that we’re halfway to making a real NerveGear,” he said. “The bad news is that so far, I’ve only figured out half of what kills you. The perfect VR half of the equation is still years away.” Luckey revealed the deadly headset on November 6, where November 6, 2022 is the day the first NerveGear set was activated in SAO. No coincidence, clearly. No, no one actually plays games on the thing. Luckey hasn’t even tested the headset himself, lest some miscalculation on his part accidentally kill him, game over screen or not. Luckey simply describes it as a piece of “desk art” and claims it’s the only VR headset out there that can kill the user, which I have to believe is true, unless there’s an actual Jigsaw killer out there that he designs one for his last trap to teach some addicted gambler a lesson. Killing video games has been a long-standing pursuit for Luckey, who opened up about it more than a year ago: It’s also notable that Luckey claims to have built weaponized gaming technology like this, given his leap from VR to founding Anduril Industries, his company that builds AI-based surveillance and defense systems for the US military. They recently landed a $1 billion contract to drive anti-drone systems to work for the United States Special Operations Command. Since VR technology is still trying to break into a niche to get people to play games that are actually fun, the idea that we’re in for some sort of Sword Art dystopia where users sign up to play games that have the potential to kill it doesn’t seem plausible. Even Sword Art Online had to trick its players into getting stuck with the NerveGear, it wasn’t like they were going around selling VR headsets with the ability to kill written in as a feature. As always, Palmer Luckey is…something else. I can’t wait for him to hold his first Bloodsport tournament on a private island or whatever weird thing comes out of his brain next. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Subscribe to my free weekly content collection newsletter, God Rolls. Take my science fiction novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
