The Oculus founder who was later fired by Facebook created a VR headset that can kill people in real life if they die in a game

Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey.Horacio Villalobos - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images

• Palmer Luckey, who created Meta's Oculus, created a VR headset that kills users in real life if they die in a video game.
• "The idea of tying your real life to your virtual avatar has always fascinated me," Luckey recently wrote.

Palmer Luckey just upped the stakes of losing in video games to a startling degree.

The original creator of the Oculus headset, which now serves as the backbone for Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse ambitions, wrote in a blog post that he had modified a VR headset to explode when the wearer loses in a video game, killing the user in real life, too.

In the post, titled "If you die in the game, you die in real life," Luckey said he was inspired to create the deadly gaming device by a fictional VR headset called "NerveGear" featured in an anime television series called Sword Art Online.

"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... only the threat of serious consequences can make a game feel real to you and every other person in the game," Luckey wrote.

Here are the specifics of the invention: