He has built a prototype of VR goggles that “can kill the player”. A provocation or a joke by Palmer Luckey?

. The date is not accidental, because it was on this day that similar equipment called NerveGear appeared in the popular anime “Sword Art Online”. His heroes were trapped in a virtual world. As per the plot of the aforementioned anime, NerveGear provides an experience so realistic that if someone dies while wearing it, the same thing becomes reality. And now – claims the creator – it would be repeated in reality.

He’s built killer VR goggles, but he’s afraid to put them on himself

He has already started work on creating “murderous goggles”, as he declares, but the world has to wait a little longer for them.

The good news is that we’re halfway to creating a real NerveGear. The bad news: this half is about killing. There are still a few years left to create the perfect VR

Palmer wrote. The other half that still needs to be created is a perfectly reproduced virtual reality. According to Palmer, we need many more years to achieve it.

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In the original NerveGear anime, he killed by emitting microwaves that were lethal to the brain. Palmer found that while he’s pretty smart, he couldn’t recreate the mechanism without a ton of extra hardware.

Instead, he used three explosives. He paired them with light sensors that supposedly detect at what rate the screen flashes when it’s flooded with red in-game, meaning imminent death. When the message “Game Over” appears on the screen, the charges would immediately explode and kill the wearer of the goggles.

Palmer pointed out that the equipment he creates is not perfect. So he is working on a mechanism that, as in “Sword Art Online”, will prevent the headset from being removed. We don’t know if Palmer is serious, running a weird marketing campaign, or has lost his mind, but he claims that the software still has many bugs that can kill the user of the device at the wrong time. Therefore, he still has not tested it on himself and believes that this kind of equipment should be coupled with a subject (probably an AI algorithm) of high intelligence, so that it can correctly define the moment of death and the consequent detonation of the charges.

Is it a joke, a performance or an advertisement?

Palmer, it is worth emphasizing, is not an anonymous tinkerer. He created Oculus, which he bought in 2014 and is still developing (now Meta).

But it’s hard to say what motivated Palmer. His entry is enigmatic and difficult to take fully seriously. At the end of his blog, he writes that at the moment his project is just a “work of office art”, provoking reflection on unexplored paths among game developers. In the next sentence, however, he adds that, to his knowledge, this is the first non-fictional example of a VR device that can really kill the user. “And it won’t be the last. See you in the metaverse” – he finished his entry.

In previous paragraphs, Palmer also wrote that he has always been fascinated by the connection between a virtual avatar and a real user. In his opinion, this immediately maximizes the stakes of the game and forces people to rethink how they interact with the virtual world and its users.

Tweaked graphics can make a game look realistic, but one way to make the game feel that way is to threaten real consequences. This is an area of ​​video game mechanics that has never been explored despite the long history of real world sports where the stakes are similar

said Palmer. However, he did not mention even one discipline that he might be referring to.

There is also a chance that it is a marketing campaign. Palmer himself stated that Oculus sales in Japan increased thanks to “Sword Art Online” and became their second most important market.

It is possible that, on the wave of popularity, it wants to take advantage of the moment and, referring to the game, take over the local VR market. Palmer left Oculus in 2017. And as he says himself, many people asked him about creating a real NerveGear. VR, on the other hand, is the future of the entertainment world, and in it brand loyalty is relatively important, which can be seen on the example of the “console wars” and disputes that have been fought between Xbox and Xbox users for almost two decades.

However, if Palmer is serious about such inventions in any way, then the meme image “Brain f******” takes on a new meaning.