The setting of the video game “Permadeath” has been elevated to a whole new level by the creator of Oculus VR. Because of the setting, if a player dies during the game, the game ends and all progress is lost. Palmer Luckey, on the other hand, has developed a Virtual Reality Market headset that kills the wearer if they fall victim to a game.
Luckey, who famously sold his business to Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion, based his creation on the well-known Japanese novel series Sword Art Online. In Sword Art Online, players are trapped in a massive, fully immersive virtual reality combat simulator.
Luckey explained in his blog that “if you die in the game, you die in real life.”
According to Forbes, the characters in the show die as they are put into something called “NerveGear,” which puts them fully into the digital world by simulating their nervous system.
Luckey, who left Oculus in 2017 and started defense contractor Anduril Industries, said that his death headset has charges that will explode and “destroy the user’s brain” if they die in the game.
He wrote about his killer feature, “The good news is that we are halfway to making a true NerveGear.”
The bad news is that I have only discovered the half that kills you thus far. The perfect-VR component is still a long way off.
Luckey asserts that this is the sole VR headset capable of user death. However, despite how absurd it is that this item even exists, no one has used it and will never do so. Luckey referred to the headset as “office art.”
The creation has unquestionably piqued the interest of gamers, but the concept does not excite those working in the industry.
Max Daniels, head of gaming at communications firm FieldHouse Associates, told Verdict, “Luckey’s’modified’ headset has no doubt grabbed headlines but far from the Black Mirror-esque world it is suggesting, the reality is far more pedestrian.”
“Simply a gimmick that, while potentially in poor taste, has little bearing on the actual gaming market,” Daniels criticized the headset.
Even though Luckey’s killer headset is unlikely to ever become a common piece of equipment, it does highlight the metaverse’s growing importance. The Luckey death headset comes as metaverse funding has increased dramatically. A virtual world where people share their experiences and interact in real time is the metaverse.
Using virtual reality (VR) headsets is frequently equated with the possibility of enjoying such an immersive experience, as that definition suggests.
The metaverse has received a lot of attention ever since Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook would become a metaverse company and changed the name of the social media giant to Meta last year.
This is especially true when considering funding. GlobalData’s data show that venture capital has invested $10.4 billion in 571 deals involving Metaverse companies so far in 2022. That is a significant increase from 2021, when metaverse businesses closed 438 deals worth more than $6.1 billion.
Although Meta may have initiated the metaverse trend as a whole, the company has yet to reap the benefits. In fact, The Zuck’s investors have actively urged the company to stop spending so much money on the metaverse while it continues to produce subpar quarterly results. Meta has also announced a new round of mass layoffs this week as a result of these results.
Luckey’s permadeath headset probably won’t change Meta’s course in any way, but it does make Zuckerberg’s floating torsos and his vision of the metaverse in the future seem a lot less wild.
