Oculus Virtual Reality (VR) founder and Oculus Rift designer Palmer Luckey has unveiled his latest VR invention: VR goggles that kill you if you lose the game.
Luckey explained in a blog post that he’s halfway to completing these VR Glasses that kill you if you lose the game, which he called NerveGear.
What exactly is a VR headset?
The headset is essentially a regular VR headset connected to three explosive charges. The charges, equipped with a photo sensor, are set to explode and kill the player when they die in whatever video game they are playing. The explosives would be triggered to kill you when the screen shows a flicker of a shade of red at a certain frequency, which the game designers would have to implement in the game.
“The idea of connecting your real life to your virtual avatar has always fascinated me – you instantly raise the stakes to the highest level and force people to fundamentally rethink the way they interact with the virtual world and the players within it,” he wrote Luckey.
The founder of Oculus VR stated that the area where the VR headset takes the player is one that has not been explored before.
How does the technology in the VR Glasses kill you if you lose the game?
Luckey, who created the device as an homage to the novel and anime series Sword Art Online, which uses similar technology as a premise, says he hasn’t had the “guts” to use it yet. In the anime series, players are trapped in a giant, immersive VR battle simulation where if they die, it will kill them in reality, as they are wired into “NerveGear” technology, and must find a way to win or lose. Luckey’s version of this concept is a VR headset that is fitted with charges that will explode “destroying the user’s brain” if they trigger an appropriate “game over” screen, according to Forbes.
“Pumped graphics can make a game feel more real, but only the threat of dire consequences can make a game feel real to you and every other person in the game. This is an area of video game mechanics that has never been explored, despite the long history of real-world sports revolving around similar stakes,” explained Luckey, as quoted by Science Alert.
More VR devices to come
Palmer Luckey stated that his project is not yet complete.
“It’s not finished yet. It’s not 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,” said Oculus Rift designer Palmer Luckey.
Luckey says, rather ominously, that the headset is “right now” just a work of art, but that it’s also the first VR device he’s aware of outside of fiction that’s capable of killing the user.