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Palmer Luckey, the creator of Oculus, created a virtual reality headset that deliberately kills people. Called ‘NerveGear’, the system aims to tightly connect people’s virtual lives with their real lives – ending both at the same time. If someone dies in a VR game or experience while wearing the headset, then they will be killed in real life at the same time, Mr Luckey said. It does this by detecting the specific shade of red that indicates when a person is dying, meaning developers could easily integrate the system. Once this red appears, three explosive units detonate, “immediately destroying the user’s brain.” Mr Luckey said the system was still incomplete. It aims to make it impossible to remove or destroy the headset, so people can get stuck inside virtual reality. And because of design limitations and the risk of it failing and killing people at the wrong time, he has yet to test it himself, he said in a blog announcing the new system. Mr Luckey said that while the technology was currently “just a piece of office art”, he intended to provoke thought about game design. But he also said it appears to be the first time such a system has been set up and “won’t be the last”. “The idea of connecting your real life with your virtual avatar has always fascinated me – you immediately raise the stakes to the highest level and force people to fundamentally rethink how they interact with the virtual world and the players within it,” wrote Mr. Luckey in the blog post announcing ‘NerveGear’. “Enhanced graphics can make a game look 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 engineering that has never been explored, despite the long history of real sports revolving around similar bets.” The technology was created to commemorate the events of the anime Sword Art Online and was announced on the date that a similar fictional technology was created in that game and the name of the equipment comes from it. In SAO, players enter a virtual dungeon and must fight their way out – but if they fail, they die in real life. Mr Luckey is most famous for creating Oculus, the virtual reality company, and its first headset. The company was bought by Meta, then Facebook, in 2014 and the two have gradually merged. He left the company in 2017 amid criticism for his pro-Trump political views, though Facebook has always denied that was the reason Luckey was fired. Since then, Mr. Luckey has continued his interest in virtual reality but also focused on defense technologies. In his blog post, Mr. Luckey mentioned that the NerveGear was built using “explosive charge units that I usually use for a different project,” which may be related to this work.
