Palmer Luckey gave inspiration details about the design. He said the device was influenced by the Japanese novel series-turned-anime Sword Art Online, an online role-playing game where death in the game means death in the real world because of the killer, in which players are trapped in “NerveGear” headset they wear. Luckey first launched Oculus in 2012, then sold it to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014. During Luckey’s tenure at the helm, he created an alternative world, where users can work, play and meet people without leaving their home. The Oculus Rift and other VR tech that now carries Meta’s big bet on the metaverse “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,” Luckey mentioned in a now-viral blog post.
When ‘game over’ blows your mind
Luckey, who left Oculus in 2017 and established Anduril Industries, a high-tech military contractor, went about the details that he was working on a real-life version of the NerveGear and was “halfway” there. Luckey explained the device is linked to “three explosive charge modules” that are bound to a “narrow-band photo sensor that can detect when the screen flashes red at a specific frequency”. “When an appropriate game-over screen is displayed, the charges fire, instantly destroying the brain of the user,” he added.
This is not the first time
According to ARS Technica, there have been previous trials to raise the stakes for gamers. In 2001, the “Tekken Torture Tournament” saw 32 participants play the popular Playstation game Tekken 3 while wearing shocking arm straps that gave them “bracing but non-lethal electrical shocks in correspondence to the injuries sustained by their onscreen avatars”. Now after Fast-forward two decades, here we are with a murderous VR headset. Luckey warned, however, that his new system isn’t “perfect”.
