Oculus founder has created a VR headset that kills you if you die in the game

Welcome to the future. A future no one asked for, but the future nonetheless. Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus, the company behind the most successful virtual reality headset in the market, has just announced in his blog that he’s working on a new device… that kills the user if their character dies inside of a game.

It might seem like a joke, but it isn’t. Luckey is really serious about the idea: “Pumped up graphics might make a game look more real, but only the threat of serious consequences can make a game feel real to you and every other person in the game.”

Luckey talks about how the idea comes from a lot of fantasy and science fiction stories that share a similar theme, with Sword Art Online being at the front of everything. In Reki Kawahara’s light novels/manga/anime, thousands of people find themselves trapped in a virtual reality game created by a mad scientist. If their health points reach zero, the VR headset (there known as the NerveGear) blasts the user’s brain with microwaves until they die. The same thing happens if someone in the real world tries to remove the NerveGear. They would end up killing whoever they were trying to help.

“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” said Luckey. “This is an area of videogame mechanics that has never been explored, despite the long history of real-world sports revolving around similar stakes. The good news is that we are halfway to making a true NerveGear. The bad news is that so far, I have only figured out the half that kills you. The perfect-VR half of the equation is still many years out.”

How does the deadly VR headset work?

The description of how this new device works is kind of bone chilling and clears out any doubts we had about whether the Oculus founder was joking or if he was actually working on it. “In SAO, the NerveGear contained a microwave emitter that could be overdriven to lethal levels, something the creator of SAO and the NerveGear itself (Akihiko Kayaba) was able to hide from his employees, regulators, and contract manufacturing partners. I am a pretty smart guy, but I couldn’t come up with any way to make anything like this work, not without attaching the headset to gigantic pieces of equipment. In lieu of this, I used three of the explosive charge modules I usually use for a different project, tying them to a narrow-band photosensor that can detect when the screen flashes red at a specific frequency, making game-over integration on the part of the developer very easy. When an appropriate game-over screen is displayed, the charges fire, instantly destroying the brain of the user.”

Of course, Luckey still hasn’t dared to try the headset for himself, and explained that he’s still working out some of the “kinks”. “This isn’t a perfect system, of course. I have plans for an anti-tamper mechanism that, like the NerveGear, will make it impossible to remove or destroy the headset. Even so, there are a huge variety of failures that could occur and kill the user at the wrong time.This is why I have not worked up the balls to actually use it myself, and also why I am convinced that, like in SAO, the final triggering should really be tied to a high-intelligence agent that can readily determine if conditions for termination are actually correct.”

Taking into account the amount of bugs and issues modern headsets have right now, maybe we’ll wait until they actually test these before we put them on just for the thrills.

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Source | Palmer Luckey