Featured Image Credit: Palmer Luckey/Kevork Djansezian / Stringer
Video games are incredibly realistic these days, with the gameplay getting more and more believable with each passing year, but things might just have gone too far with this VR headset.
Palmer Luckey is the creator of Oculus, a VR (virtual reality) headset that gives gamers the chance to become fully immersed in a make-believe world.
However, the tech creator might have just taken things to the next level by trying to build a device that could kill the user.
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No, we're not joking.
The tech idea, known as 'NerveGear', aims to link a player's virtual experience to their real life, meaning that if they die in a game they die for real. Almost sounds like something from A Nightmare on Elm Street, right?
The device is inspired by the anime Sword Art Online, in which thousands of gamers get stuck in a VR world.
Once the 'game over' screen appears showing a player has died in the game, three modules explode in the headset, 'instantly destroying the brain of the user'.
Intense, right? I don't know about you, but that's not my idea of fun.
Luckey says that the device isn't anywhere near ready yet and he still needs a couple more years to perfect it. His end goal is to create a device that aligns perfectly with the player's real world.
On his blog, he writes: "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.
"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.
"The good news is that we are halfway to making a true NerveGear. The bad news is that so far, I have only figured out the half that kills you. The perfect-VR half of the equation is still many years out."
Oh, great. That's the good news, huh?
Understandably, Luckey has some concerns over the device, including the fact that it could accidentally kill the user at the wrong time. Gulp.
He says: "This isn’t a perfect system, of course. I have plans for an anti-tamper mechanism that, like the NerveGear, will make it impossible to remove or destroy the headset.
"Even so, there are a huge variety of failures that could occur and kill the user at the wrong time.
"This is why I have not worked up the balls to actually use it myself, and also why I am convinced that, like in SAO, the final triggering should really be tied to a high-intelligence agent that can readily determine if conditions for termination are actually correct."
He adds: "At this point, it is just a piece of office art, a thought-provoking reminder of unexplored avenues in game design.
"It is also, as far as I know, the first non-fiction example of a VR device that can actually kill the user. It won’t be the last."
