A TERRIFYING new Virtual Reality headset can kill users in real life when they die in the game, according to its designer.
Palmer Luckey, the founder of VR gaming company Oculus that’s now part of Facebook’s Meta, has created a headset that has the power to kill players with three explosive charges when they lose a game.
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The killer headset is named NeveGear and works with a game called Sword Art Online, which was inspired by Japanese anime and sees players battling through a dungeon as they tried to escape a mad scientist’s world.
“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 wrote in a blog post.
The designer explained the device is connected to three explosive charge modules above the screen that are aimed at the user’s forehead.
When the player dies in the game, the microwave emitter would go off, killing them.
“Pumped up graphics might make a game look more real, but only the threat of serious consequences can make a game feel real to you and every other person in the game,” Luckey said.
Luckey, who also works as a defense contractor, said the device’s explosives are similar to ones he has used in “different” unspecified projects.
In the game that inspired the headset, players are killed with a microwave emitter, but Luckey said he couldn’t recreate it perfectly, so he used explosives instead.
“I am a pretty smart guy, but I couldn’t come up with any way to make anything like this work, not without attaching the headset to gigantic pieces of equipment,” he added.
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While the headset is the first of its kind, it’s not available for sale, and it’s just a piece of “office art and a thought-provoking reminder of unexplored avenues in game design,” according to Luckey.
The designer also said he has only figured out how to make the headset kill the player, and the “perfect-VR half of the equation” is still many years out.
Luckey sold Oculus to Facebook in 2014, and told CNBC he was fired “for no reason at all” in 2017.
He suggested he was let go over his politics, something Facebook strongly denied.
