Palmer Luckey’s New VR Headset Will Kill You In Real Life If You Die In-Game

This new VR headset made by Palmer Luckey — the founder of Oculus VR — is going to blow your mind, and we’re not being metaphorical about this. In a newly written blog post on the official Palmer Luckey Blog, the famed VR developer has a new virtual reality product in the works, called NerveGear, and it will short-circuit your brain if you happen to die in-game.

Of course, there’s a lot to work out here and Palmer hasn’t tested the product first-hand because of, well, obvious reasons. The inspiration for this killer headset seems to come from Sword Art Online—a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) that even has a particular VRMMORPG version coming out for it. 

The Rundown: 

• Palmer Luckey is one of the pioneers of the concept of modern-day virtual reality. He founded Oculus VR and designed the Oculus Rift. In 2014, however, Oculus, the company, was sold to Facebook for a total of $2, thereby making Mark Zuckerberg the current owner of the VR project. This is one of the major founding principles of the company we now know as Meta. 
• Recently announced in a blog post, Palmer Luckey revealed that a real-life NervGear VR headset is halfway into full development. The product, at its core, would literally deprive the player of their life if one would die in-game, similar to the story of Sword Art Online where thousands of players fall into the virtual reality world trap of an evil scientist. 
• The headset would kill the player upon their death in-game by emitting lethal microwaves to the brain. Three explosive charge modules are attached to the headset that would trigger and fry the forebrain of the person playing if it’s been determined that the player has died in the game.

“If you die in game, you die in real life,” says Palmer in his blog that he uploaded in relatively recent times. Sword Art Online features a story setting where in-game VRMMORPG (Virtual Reality Massively Multiplayer Online) gamers are invited to a seemingly friendly game, but little do they know what awaits them ahead. 

Ostensibly, the SAO incident revolves around all those players that lost their lives to the mad scientist purporting to be an amiable game creator.

Now, taking inspiration from just that scenario, Palmer writes that he’s currently focusing on “an area of videogame mechanics that has never been explored, despite the long history of real-world sports revolving around similar stakes.”

According to the well-acclaimed VR developer, NerveGear — the mind-blowing virtual reality headset made apparent in Sword Art Online — isn’t coming out anytime soon, which is pretty obvious, considering the complexity revolving around the notion. However, Palmer does say, ”

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.”

He then goes on to explain how the NerveGear would work in terms of the actual killing part. A total of three explosive charge modules would be tied to the headset which would further connect to a photosensor. This photosensor would have to accurately detect the “Game Over’ screen in-game whenever the label appears.

Once done, a signal would be sent out to the modules that would end up firing the charges, thereby “instantly destroying the brain of the user.” This is absolutely brutal and definitely not what lightweight, fun gaming stands for.

What’s more, is that Palmer is working on an anti-tamper mechanism for NerveGear too that would effectively bar people from taking the headset off or destroying its destructive mechanics once they’ve put it on.

Again, there’s a lot that needs to be worked out for the project at the moment since there are “a huge variety of failures that could occur and kill the user at the wrong time,” among other considerable factors.  

A surprising part of this scenario is how people are actually conforming to the project. YouTuber VRelity uploaded the following video on his channel, detailing the release of the forthcoming Sword Art Online VR game.

One of the top comments on the video says, “My wife and I have determined that once we get old and our time is approaching, if full dive is around, we want to spend our final days/weeks/months inside full dive VR until we go to meet our maker. So we can see each other be genuinely happy instead in whatever pain, sickness or fear we may be in.”

What do you think of this lethal VR headset? Would you give it a go and put your skills to the test? Do let us know in the comments section ahead.