In many video games, one does not stop dying. Nothing happens, of course, because you don’t die in real life. You simply start another game or resume the one you were already playing. Some people wonder, however, what would happen if when you died in a game you also died in real life. That is now feasible with a new invention from the one who definitively promoted the virtual reality segment.
SAO Incident. ‘Sword Art Online is a fictional video game that later inspired a manganite and the so-called SAO Incident. In this VRMMORPG the proposal was unique: if our score reached zero, we would die immediately in real life.
To achieve this, the players would use the NerveGear, special virtual reality glasses because when detecting that event they would emit lethal microwaves for the player. The idea was just that. An idea. Until now.
From the Oculus to this. The idea is now a reality, and the person who has made it possible is none other than Palmer Luckey, who a decade ago (a bit) revolutionized the world with the Oculus Rift and the definitive takeoff of virtual reality —and who later criticized it and created a controversial company —. Luckey explained on his blog about him that “I’m a pretty smart guy, but I couldn’t think of any way to make something like that work, not without connecting the glasses to gigantic components.”
Microwave 0 – explosives 1 . Instead of microwaves, Luckey came up with the idea of integrating explosive charges that he connected to a photosensor. This component “detects when the screen flashes red when the screen flashes red at a specific frequency.” With that, it is possible to detect the end of the game, which causes the charges to go off “instantly destroying the user’s brain”.
Wait, I didn’t have to kill you yet. Luckey himself confesses that the device is not perfect, but adds that “I have plans for an anti-tamper mechanism that, like the NerveGear, will make it impossible to remove or destroy the glasses.”
The problem is not so much that as the fact that he himself admits that “even so, there are a wide variety of failures that could occur and kill the user at the wrong time. That’s why I haven’t dared to use it myself”.
A reflection on the world of video games. Right now the device is basically a “piece of office art,” but as its creator puts it, it’s also “a thought-provoking reminder of unexplored avenues in game design.” For him, this connection between the virtual and the real is what is really striking:
“The idea of linking your real life to your virtual avatar has always fascinated me: you instantly raise the stakes to the highest level and force people to fundamentally rethink how they interact with the virtual world and the players in it. The graphics Exaggerated can make a game seem more real, but only the threat of dire consequences can make a game feel real to you and everyone else in it.This is an area of video game mechanics that has never been explored, despite the long history of real-world sports revolving around similar betting.”
So, Luckey has created —that we know of— the first device of its kind that would kill you in real life if you die in the video game. Still, he admitted at the end of his story, his project “won’t be the last” to explore this type of feature.
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