Oculus Founder Palmer Luckey Created a VR Headset That Will Literally Make Your Head Explode

It’s an old trope in quite a lot of dumb sci-fi motion pictures regarding digital actuality: you die within the sport, you die in actual life. You’ve heard it earlier than. Characters get trapped in a online game and should play for his or her lives. If their avatar perishes, so do they.

Well, it seems that somebody has really willed this trope into actuality. That is, somebody created a VR headset that actually kills you when you lose a online game. Fun, proper?

The creator is not only any ol’ somebody, however Palmer Luckey, the 30-year-old digital actuality wunderkind, Trump-obsessed weirdo, and one of many co-founders of Oculus, the VR agency Facebook purchased in 2014 for a cool $3 billion.

Luckey dropped a blog post on Sunday, explaining his bizarre new headset—which he claims is generally a “piece of office art” for now—and included an image of it as nicely.

For reference, it seems to be like this:

Yes, this factor will really finish your life. More particularly, it’s rigged with bombs in order that your head will explode.

In his blog post, Luckey explains how his deadly new contraption is meant to work:

I used three of the explosive cost modules I often use for a distinct venture, tying them to a narrow-band photosensor that may detect when the display flashes purple at a particular frequency, making game-over integration on the a part of the developer very simple. When an acceptable game-over display is displayed, the fees fireplace, immediately destroying the mind of the person.

Jesus.

In different phrases, Luckey has principally dropped at life the plot of the dopey 2006 horror flick Stay Alive, by which hapless avid gamers stumble throughout a online game that ends in their homicide in the event that they lose. Or, extra precisely, he has realized the conceit behind a nerdy anime internet comedian from mid-2000s, Sword Art Online, that he says was the main inspiration behind the venture. In the comedian, characters don a factor referred to as “NerveGear,” which is an “incredible device that perfectly recreates reality using a direct neural interface that is also capable of killing the user.” To Luckey, that is an thrilling thought:

The thought of tying your actual life to your digital avatar has all the time fascinated me – you immediately elevate the stakes to the utmost stage and drive folks to essentially rethink how they work together with the digital world and the gamers inside it. Pumped up graphics may make a sport look extra actual, however solely the specter of severe penalties could make a sport really feel actual to you and each different individual within the sport.

Righttttt…That’s actually an attention-grabbing thought, although some may argue that the pleasure of gaming really derives from having the ability to put your self in death-defying eventualities and not have your head explode. Some folks may argue that.

Anyway, whether or not its a good suggestion or not, Luckey appears to have plans to make his enjoyable new hat much more horrifying than it at the moment is by including “anti-tamper” tech to it:

This isn’t an ideal system, after all. I’ve plans for an anti-tamper mechanism that, just like the NerveGear, will make it not possible to take away or destroy the headset.

Yes, so the last word aim right here is to create a helmet that you just actually can’t take off. Once it’s been clamped to your noggin the one two eventualities by which you’ll have the ability to take away it are A) the one the place you win the sport or B) the one the place your decapitated corpse is dragged out of a pile of gore-strewn rubble by no matter unlucky soul occurs to stumble by. This might be why Luckey hasn’t really used the factor himself but. He says:

… there are an enormous number of failures that would happen and kill the person on the incorrect time. This is why I’ve not labored up the balls to really use it myself, and likewise why I’m satisfied that, like in SAO, the ultimate triggering ought to actually be tied to a high-intelligence agent that may readily decide if situations for termination are literally right.

…At this level, it’s only a piece of workplace artwork, a thought-provoking reminder of unexplored avenues in sport design.

Let’s be trustworthy, Luckey. There might be a really low chance that you just’re ever going to make use of this factor, proper? Right, man? Still props for creativity and for making one thing that the U.S. navy will little doubt discover some horrific new software for within the near-future.