The possibilities of VR are endless (well, as endless as anything can be when you have a vision-obscuring helmet strapped to your head). But the founder of one of the biggest VR setups in the game wants to take things to another level.
Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, has had some time to think since Facebook bought his invention for $3 billion. After some reflection, he has an idea: kill people using VR.
This is one of those old wives' tales that might be true and might not. It's also connected, tangentially, to the central plot point of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies: the concept that dying in a fantasy realm might lead to actual, real-life death.
People don't look cool when they're wearing a VR headset and playing a VR game, but anyone who's done so will tell you just how immersive it can be. Oculus was founded in 2012 by Palmer Luckey, Brendan Iribe, Michael Antonov, and Nate Mitchell to develop the Oculus Rift gaming headset.
Oculus was sold to Meta Platforms (Facebook) for $3 billion a few years ago. Even though he's sold his invention, Palmer Luckey described some of the places he'd like VR to go in a recent blog post.
Luckey does a deep dive into the concept discussed earlier: dying in the real world from trauma experienced in the virtual world. He's apparently been inspired enough by this that he's thought about how to implement it with one of his headsets.
In case you're wondering, he has a proof of concept.
"I used three of the explosive charge modules I usually use for a different project, tying them to a narrow-band photosensor that can detect when the screen flashes red at a specific frequency, making game-over integration on the part of the developer very easy," he wrote. "When an appropriate game-over screen is displayed, the charges fire, instantly destroying the brain of the user."
Palmer says he was inspired by Sword Art Online, a web comic that deals with similar themes.
"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," he explained.
"This isn’t a perfect system, of course," Luckey wrote. "I have plans for an anti-tamper mechanism that, like the NerveGear, will make it impossible to remove or destroy the headset."
In other words, once someone puts on the murderous headset, it isn't coming off until the autopsy.
Describing it as a piece of "office art," Luckey says he isn't going to use the headset or try to convince anyone else to use it. That's good, because it would literally be premeditated homicide.
A lot of gamers would argue that gaming is fun because you get to experience realistic, dangerous scenarios from the comfort of your couch. If playing video games carried a high risk of death, it's hard to imagine video games retaining their popularity.
This is kind of unusual news, because while VR is booming, VR that can potentially kill you is not really a thing that people seem to have much desire for.
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