Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey has come up with an innovative and incredibly dangerous cross between virtual reality and the real world: a VR headset that will literally kill you if you die while gaming.

The headset is not an actual product, but a thought experiment created as a cosplay.

Luckey in a blog post (opens in new tab) describing the "SAO Incident," a fictional event in which 10,000 players were trapped in a VRMMORPG (opens in new tab) series and 4,000 of them eventually died in-game, I introduced the idea for this headset. The SAO Incident in fiction began on November 6, 2022, and to mark the anniversary, Luckey published a "play or die" piece on his blog.

"The idea of connecting my real life with my virtual avatar has always fascinated me. It instantly raises the stakes to the maximum level and forces you to fundamentally rethink how you interact with the virtual world and the players within it," Luckey wrote. Powering up the graphics may make the game seem more realistic, but only the threat of serious consequences can make the game feel real to you and everyone else participating in it"

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"This is an area of video game mechanics that has never been explored, despite the long history of real-world sports revolving around similar stakes"

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The headset in Sword Art Online, called the Nerve Gear, used bursts of high-intensity microwaves to kill the wearer. The device had three explosives embedded in it, placed directly on the user's forehead and connected to a "narrow-band light sensor" designed to detect specific shades of red. When the integrated Game Over screen appears, the color flashes and the explosives are fired, "instantly destroying the user's brain."

Of course, it's all a play shaded by trolls, and when Luckey describes his future ideas for this device, "Like the NerveGear, there are plans for a tamper-proof mechanism that would make it impossible to remove or destroy the headset," super He couldn't resist adding some bad-guy flair.

Did Palmer Luckey actually develop the Call Up device (opens in new tab)? At the very least, it is reasonable to assume that he has the ability to plant a bomb on the Oculus Quest: after leaving Facebook, which acquired Oculus in 2014 for $2 billion (opens in new tab), Luckey founded Anduril Industries (opens in new tab) a defense technology company. He also stated in his post that the trigger device "should be tied to a highly intelligent agent that can easily determine if the termination conditions are actually correct." This sounds like a pretty clear connection to the work being done at Anduril, but he is not saying that he is developing AI-powered assassination devices or anything like that; Luckey said in his blog post that he typically uses the implanted explosives "for other projects." He stated.

Regardless of what is actually packed in the device, he clarified that while he predicts that someone might use it someday, he is not actually using it.

"There is a huge variety of malfunctions that could kill a user at the wrong time," he wrote.

"And that is why I am convinced that, as in SAO, the final trigger should be tied to a highly intelligent agent that can easily determine if the termination conditions are indeed correct.

"At this point, this is just office art, suggesting unexplored avenues in game design. It is also, as far as I know, the first non-fictional example of a VR device that can actually kill its user. It will not be the last.