Palmer Luckey developed the killer VR headset as a prototype model which he hasn’t tried yet
If Squid Game Series with virtual reality has set one milestone in the gaming pop culture, the headsets that Oculus has brought out can give gamers an irreversible and bitter taste of truth. Palmer Luckey the VR godfather, who sold Oculus to Facebook claims that he developed a Killer VR headset. It has nothing to do with the look or finish. It can kill you literally if you die in the game. A former defense contractor, Palmer Luckey developed the killer VR headset as a prototype model which he hasn’t tried yet. Explaining the motivation behind the product, he says the new killer VR headset is inspired by the Sword Art Online incident where a group of gamers with a NerveGear are held hostage by a mad scientist and the only way to escape is to play the game till the end. He published the blog on the same day, the game went live in the story. “This might be a game, but it is not something you play”, he tweeted, “To commemorate the Sword Art Online Incident of November 6th, 2022, I made the OPQNVG, the first virtual reality device capable of killing the user.” Interestingly, Mark Zuckerberg rebranded this technology as the foundation for Meta. “You want NerveGear, the incredible device that perfectly recreates reality using a direct neural interface that is also capable of killing the user. 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”, says Palmer in his blog.
The killer VR headsets are equipped with nodes above the display panel emitting powerful electric pulses capable of destroying the brain. The charges explode at a certain frequency automatically when the game ends or when the gamer triggers the appropriate ‘game over’ screen. Luckey, bringing in his experience with defense technology, could only get it half way through. He says the device’s creator in SAO could hide from his employers, partners and contractors but with him, his was a different case although he couldn’t succeed completely even after attaching the headset to gigantic pieces of equipment. After failing to recreate the NerveGear microwave technology, he went for one using explosive modular charge – a technology he used for ‘other projects’ as mentioned in the blog. Palmer says he wants gamers to have a more realistic experience with a fear of consequence lurking in the back of their heads. The story is not over yet. He has plans to make it tamper-proof and impossible to remove as it happens with NerveGear. He says he couldn’t muster enough courage to try to bring this feature to reality. “The perfect-VR half of the equation is still many years out,” Luckey said. The gear has certain imperfections that can kill the player at the wrong time, which he said he wants to work on. Comparing his invention to a piece of office Art for time being and a non-fiction example of VR art he hints at the inevitable proliferation of these killer devices in the future.
