Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has developed a revolutionary new headset that literally kills you if you lose the game.
“The idea of tying your real life to your virtual avatar has always fascinated me,” Luckey, founder of virtual reality company Oculus, wrote in a blog post, titled “If you die in the game, you die in real life.”
“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 wrote.
“Only the threat of serious consequences can make a game feel real to you and every other person in the game.”
Luckey’s NerveGear headset will respond to game-over screens by emitting microwave bursts that fry brain cells.
Luckey said the headsets aren’t ready for the test phase just yet. There are legal issues to iron out and purchasers must sign a release of liability form in case of death.
“I have not worked up the balls to actually use it myself,” he wrote.
Luckey said the final game-over screen should be linked to a “high-intelligence agent” who will determine “if conditions for termination are actually correct.”
Oculus is the mainframe for Mark Zuckerberg‘s metaverse, his failed Meta virtual reality universe.
Luckey sold Oculus to Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion. He told CNBC he left Facebook in 2017 after being fired “for no reason at all.”
