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Stop Building the [Torment Nexus]: Palmer Luckey wants to Kill You Edition
Lanz
...Za?Registered User regular
...Za?Registered User regular
So we live in a glorious age of technology. Computers and technology have empowered us to accomplish things never before thought possible, at speeds that would have taken earlier generations years of not decades to accomplish.
But, because we are still a society lorded over by gobsmacking idiots who are overly influenced by the pop culture ephemera that they latched onto, but no deeper than the cool surface layer, we also continually see these people trying to recreate the absolute worst shit from science fiction and fantasy, proving that no engineer should be allowed to work in the field without first demonstrating a firm and steady grasp of the humanities.
In this instance:
Palmer Luckey thinks it’d be pretty cool if he could murder you with a VR headset, like the villain from Sword Art Online.
No that’s not my comparison that is literally the influence at play:
Palmer Luckey wants to kill you and thinks that’s the most fun possibility in gaming. And has a distressing level of access, apparently, to explosive charges.
For the love of god, Tech Bros: Stop Building the Torment Nexus
But, because we are still a society lorded over by gobsmacking idiots who are overly influenced by the pop culture ephemera that they latched onto, but no deeper than the cool surface layer, we also continually see these people trying to recreate the absolute worst shit from science fiction and fantasy, proving that no engineer should be allowed to work in the field without first demonstrating a firm and steady grasp of the humanities.
In this instance:
Palmer Luckey thinks it’d be pretty cool if he could murder you with a VR headset, like the villain from Sword Art Online.
No that’s not my comparison that is literally the influence at play:
Today is November 6th, 2022, the day of the SAO Incident. Thousands of VRMMORPG gamers were trapped by a mad scientist inside a death game that could only be escaped through completion. If their hit points dropped to zero, their brain would be bombarded by extraordinarily powerful microwaves, supposedly killing the user. The same would happen if anyone in the real world tampered with their NerveGear, the virtual reality head-mounted-display that transported their minds and souls to Aincrad, the primary setting of Sword Art Online.
…
But that isn’t what you are here for. You want NerveGear, the incredible device that perfectly recreates reality using a direct neural interface that is also capable of killing the user. 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. Pumped up graphics might make a game look more real, but only the threat of serious consequences can make a game feel real to you and every other person in the game. This is an area of videogame mechanics that has never been explored, despite the long history of real-world sports revolving around similar stakes.
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.
In SAO, the NerveGear contained a microwave emitter that could be overdriven to lethal levels, something the creator of SAO and the NerveGear itself (Akihiko Kayaba) was able to hide from his employees, regulators, and contract manufacturing partners. I am a pretty smart guy, but I couldn’t come up with any way to make anything like this work, not without attaching the headset to gigantic pieces of equipment. In lieu of this, I used three of the explosive charge modules I usually use for a different project, tying them to a narrow-band photosensor that can detect when the screen flashes red at a specific frequency, making game-over integration on the part of the developer very easy. When an appropriate game-over screen is displayed, the charges fire, instantly destroying the brain of the user.
This isn’t a perfect system, of course. I have plans for an anti-tamper mechanism that, like the NerveGear, will make it impossible to remove or destroy the headset. Even so, there are a huge variety of failures that could occur and kill the user at the wrong time. This is why I have not worked up the balls to actually use it myself, and also why I am convinced that, like in SAO, the final triggering should really be tied to a high-intelligence agent that can readily determine if conditions for termination are actually correct.
Palmer Luckey wants to kill you and thinks that’s the most fun possibility in gaming. And has a distressing level of access, apparently, to explosive charges.
For the love of god, Tech Bros: Stop Building the Torment Nexus
Lanz on
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Which project
Which project, Palmer Luckey
I think Palmer just let slip Anduril’s next big proposal to Customs and Border Patrol
Reminder that he left Oculus and then founded a defense contractor called “Anduril” with a bunch of ex-Palantir people
Because, again, we live in a hell ruled by nerds who desperately want to build the worst shit from the stories they grew up on