When you play video games, it is normal that from time to time, you make a mistake that causes the character you control to ‘lose life’ and, therefore, you have to start over from the last checkpoint. What if someone developed a title where you lose, you die in real life?
Palmer Luckey, the early computer genius and father of the virtual reality company called Oculus, which has long been part of Meta, has announced that he is working on creating VR glasses that effectively kill the user. When you lose a game
As he points out in a post on his blog, the fault that he is working on this project lies with Sword Art Online, a popular Japanese anime, manga, and video game franchise. In one of his stories, a helmet called NerveGear is shown developed by a judgment-impaired scientist that forces the wearer to complete a game of video games if he wants to survive.
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The idea of linking your real life to your virtual avatar has always fascinated me: you instantly raise the stakes to the highest level and force people to fundamentally rethink how they interact with the virtual world and the players within it, Luckey notes the publication.
That’s how it works.
At the moment, according to the father of Oculus, he has already managed to find a way for his NerveGear to kill the user. Instead of using microwaves, as in Sword Art Online, the computer scientist has resorted to explosive charges that detonate automatically if the visor screen flashes red in a certain way.
“I have plans for an anti-tamper mechanism that, like the NerveGear, will make it impossible to remove or destroy the scope. Even so, a wide variety of errors could occur and kill the user at the wrong time,” says Luckey.
According to the father of Oculus, the headset is, for now, just “a work of office art, a thought-provoking reminder of untrodden paths in game design.” It is also the first time a device designed to end the life of its owner has been developed. “It won’t be the last,” Luckey predicts.
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