Palmer Luckey, the creator of Oculus and a defense contractor, claims to have created a VR headgear that, if the user’s avatar dies in a game, blows up the user’s skull using “explosive charge modules.” Isn’t it crazy?
“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,” Luckey wrote in a blog post about the grim prototype. “Pumped up graphics might make a game look more real, but only the threat of serious consequences can make a game feel real to you and every other person in the game.”
“If you die in the game,” he wrote, paraphrasing an age-old trope, “you die in real life.”
There’s a lot to process here, and if someone else claimed to have invented such a device, we may not give them much attention. But Luckey isn’t your average coder.
He is largely regarded as the founder of contemporary virtual reality. Combine his VR expertise with the fact that he now makes pricey guns for a living with the tech he invented that is presently acting as the foundation for Facebook CEO and want tobe god Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse?
