In a blog post, Luckey presented the concept of the headgear by describing the “SAO Incident,” a fictitious occurrence in the Sword Art Online series in which 10,000 players were stuck in a VRMMORPG and 4,000 of them died as a consequence of their in-game deaths. To commemorate the fictional beginning of the SAO Incident on November 6, 2022, Luckey released his own “play-or-die” creation on his blog.

Get Ready to Try a Virtual Headset That can Kill you If you lose a videogame

“The concept of connecting your actual life to your virtual avatar has long intrigued me; you suddenly increase the stakes to the maximum and drive people to radically rethink how they interact with the virtual world and its users,” Luckey said. “Enhanced visuals may make a game appear more realistic, but only the possibility of dire consequences can make a game feel genuine to you and every other player.” Despite the long history of real-world sports involving equivalent stakes, this aspect of video game mechanics has never been examined. How does the headset work? The NerveGear headsets in Sword Art Online utilized high-intensity microwave pulses to kill their wearer. On the other hand, Luckey’s technology employs a more kinetic technique to brain melting. It is implanted with 3 explosive charges, which are placed directly on the user’s forehead and attached to a “narrow-band photosensor” intended to detect a certain shade of red. Whenever an integrated game-over screen is displayed, the color will flare and the charges will discharge, “immediately killing the user’s brain.” Luckey could not resist adding a supervillain flourish while discussing his future ambitions for the gadget, stating that he had “plans for an anti-tamper system that, like NerveGear, will make it hard to remove or damage the headset.” Check out? Mark Zuckerberg Reveals new Quest Pro VR headset