It appeared that Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Oculus, may be spending too much time at Anduril Industries, the defense technology company he founded after leaving Facebook. This gentleman has developed a new VR headset, but you probably don’t want to try it because if a user dies in the virtual world, the device kills them in the real world using explosives.
The Matrix is one of several science fiction movies in which those who die in a virtual world also die in real life, which Luckey addresses in his blog post. He also references an incident from Sword Art Online, a mid-2000s anime that spawned several video games. According to the fiction, something happened in “SAO” on Nov. 6, 2022, in which 10,000 players were trapped in a VRMMORPG, 4,000 of whom died in real life after their characters died in the game.
To mark the date, Luckey announced the development of a virtual reality headset that can perform the same function as SAO’s NerveGear headset, which is to kill the user. Instead of high-intensity microwave beams that end a player’s life, Luckey accomplishes the task with three explosives embedded in the front of the wearer’s helmet.
The explosives are triggered when a “photo sensor” detects a specific shade of red that appears on the screen when you are killed in the game. Luckey said the charges “instantly destroy the user’s brain” when triggered, which is reassuring to know. He also plans to add a tamper-proof mechanism so the headset can’t be removed or destroyed while someone is wearing it.
The good news for those who already think they’re in a dystopian hell where there’s a killer VR case is that it looks like a modified Meta Quest Pro, so “at this point” it’s just a prototype, or maybe not even that.
Luckey admitted that he hasn’t had the heart to try out the device himself, and that at this point it’s just “food for thought on unexplored avenues in game design.” He left with the ominous warning that while this is the first VR headset that can kill a user, it won’t be the last.