November 6, 2022 is the date in the Japanese-light-novel Sword Art Online when a fictional VR company debuts the "NerveGear" that can kill its wearer. The conflict of the novel leans heavily on the classic trope — die in the dream, die for real.
Fans of Sword Art Online understandably love the Oculus Rift VR gaming system as it's the closest thing to the book that really exists (and Japan is the second biggest market for the gaming system).
In that way, it makes sense that Palmer Luckey, the founder of the Oculus VR system, would do something on November 6 to celebrate the novel.
On his blog, he posted the following announcement:
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.
That's right. Luckey built a VR headset that will kill you in real life if you die in a game.
The headset has three explosive charges that will go off if the display shows a certain wavelength of red.
I can't see that going wrong at all.
Luckey is pretty candid that there is more than a slight possibility that the VR system might accidentally go off, and he hasn't tested it yet to see how well it functions, but he hopes to keep working on the prototype.
Next, he wants to add a tamper-proof lock that will set off the explosives if you try to remove the system before the game is finished.
Honestly, I expected that Twitter would be full of people on the Left telling him to follow through and test the machine himself.
Luckey sold Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion and then used that money to actively endorse and support Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020.
Internal emails that were leaked showed that Facebook actually fired him for supporting Trump in 2016. Zuckerberg personally pressured him to support Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson instead of Trump, so the rabid lefties in Silicon Valley would chill out.
But he refused, and the lefties lost their collective minds.
However, rather than attacking Luckey over politics, there seem to be a lot of volunteers to beta test the machine for him.
What a sad state the world is in.
Thankfully Luckey says,
At this point, it is just a piece of office art, a thought-provoking reminder of unexplored avenues in game design.
