Anduril is teaming up with Meta to build XR products for US and allied militaries, starting with the EagleEye AR/VR helmet.
Palmer Luckey’s defense firm says the partnership will see the two companies “design, build, and field a range of integrated XR products that provide warfighters with enhanced perception and enable intuitive control of autonomous platforms on the battlefield”.
What Is Anduril? What Is IVAS?
Anduril is a defense company founded by Palmer Luckey in 2017 after he was fired from Oculus by Facebook. It was recently valued at $28 billion.
Anduril’s core product is Lattice, a software system that takes in sensor data from a wide variety of platforms, including both Anduril and third-party assets, and autonomously integrates it to build a unified view of the entire battlespace, while bringing attention to the most salient targets. The company also makes and sells a variety of unmanned aerial and underwater systems that leverage Lattice.
Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) is a US Army program first announced back in 2018, and in 2021 the contract was awarded to Microsoft, with a stated value of up to $21.88 billion over 10 years for more than 100,000 headsets. The eventual aim of IVAS was to equip every US Army soldier with an augmented reality helmet that can vastly expand their situational awareness in combat, as well as enhance their training.
Previously reported potential use cases for IVAS include:
- overlaying icons on friendly units, objectives, threats, and points of interest
- built-in night vision & thermal view modes
- live picture-in-picture feeds from drones, including the Soldier Borne Sensor (SBS) personal drone
- simulated weapons & enemies for training exercises
- scanning nearby people for signs of illness, such as a high temperature
- facial recognition for hostage rescue situations
Until now, the IVAS hardware was set to be provided by Microsoft, a highly customized version of HoloLens 2 with a wider field of view and enhanced sensors. But Microsoft’s IVAS was plagued with issues. In 2022 the US Congress rejected further orders following “mission-affecting physical impairments” including headaches, eyestrain and nausea”. Previous evaluations had found reliability issues, with “essential functions” sometimes failing. In 2023 Microsoft upgraded the system to improve “reliability, low light sensor performance, and form factor”, but it seems these improvements weren’t enough.
Earlier this year, Anduril announced that it is taking over the US Army’s IVAS program from Microsoft. Microsoft isn’t completely out of the project, though. Anduril will leverage Microsoft’s Azure cloud, to for example run advanced AI models too big to run on-device.
The news of the partnership comes three months after Anduril announced that it’s taking over the US Army’s IVAS headset program, replacing Microsoft’s customized HoloLens solution. The next stage of the Army’s program is called SMBC (Soldier-Borne Mission Command), and Anduril and Meta have already “jointly submitted a white paper as a team”.
In an interview shortly after the February IVAS announcement, Palmer Luckey revealed that Anduril’s headset is an “integrated ballistic shell” called EagleEye, and described how it will give soldiers superhuman senses.
In a new interview with veteran tech reporter Ashlee Vance, published today, Luckey revealed that the Meta partnership has been in the works for almost a year, and confirmed that the EagleEye helmet is the first joint product.
While the two companies haven’t formally said which specific Meta XR technologies will be used in EagleEye, when describing the rationale for the partnership Luckey specifically mentions Meta’s “multi-billion dollar” bet to develop “optical-grade silicon carbide optics that achieved heretofore impossible levels of field of view and acuity”.
David Heaney
That refers to the “wonder” material used for the lenses of Meta’s Orion AR glasses prototype, which enables it to achieve a 70 degrees diagonal field of view in a thin and light form factor. Today, producing optical-grade silicon carbide is incredibly complex and expensive, and there is no established commercial-scale supply chain for it. Because of this, Meta admitted at Connect that to sell Orion as a product, it would have to be priced above $10,000.
But this kind of pricing is well within the range of what militaries would be willing to pay. And if Anduril and Meta build out a supply chain for optical-grade silicon carbide, over time this would likely bring the cost down, accelerating its path to adoption in consumer products too.
Thus, Anduril could benefit from the partnership by getting access to the world-class AR lens designs Meta spent billions of dollars to develop. Simultaneously, Meta could see a viable supply chain for these lenses emerge sooner than it had expected, enabling AR glasses that really live up to Orion. Meta has admitted that its first AR glasses, which it reportedly plans to launch in 2027, will use glass lenses with a narrower field of view.
But this wouldn’t be the only optical system used for EagleEye. Luckey also explained that EagleEye is a modular helmet that can support “many different types” of display systems via an open architecture, even systems made by companies that don’t work with Anduril.
“I don’t see this as just like 10,000 units or 20,000 units. I see this as outfitting the entire armed forces. And so everything I’m doing is to try and build that architecture that scales to that. Everybody doing this with different sensors, different vision systems, different processors that are tailored to their specific mission. As light and as low cost as possible for their mission”, Luckey explained.
Blake Harris
Just a few years ago, the idea of Palmer Luckey working with Meta again would have been almost unthinkable.
Luckey founded Anduril Industries in 2017 after Facebook fired him from Oculus, the previous company he founded in 2012, which spawned the consumer VR industry and over time became Meta’s Reality Labs division.
The proximate cause of Luckey’s firing was the revelation that he donated $10,000 to a pro-Trump non-profit organization called Nimble America, which at the time had put out a single billboard with a caricature of Hillary Clinton captioned “Too Big To Jail”. Through misleading headlines and outright fabrication, Luckey’s donation was widely falsely reported as funding racist trolls and memes online, despite no evidence ever emerging to support this. After significant pressure from Facebook employees, seemingly believing these claims, Luckey was fired.
David Heaney
During a US Senate hearing in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg was directly asked whether Palmer Luckey was fired for his political views, and responded “I can commit it was not because of a political view”.
Just over a year ago, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth also suggested that Luckey was not fired for his politics, in a public argument with Luckey and John Carmack, but admitted that he was “working with secondhand information” (he was not involved in Oculus at the time).
Then, in early October, just days after Meta presented the Orion AR glasses prototype, Bosworth issued a public apology to Luckey, declaring that he “dug into” the firing and discovered that he “was misinformed”, though noted “that’s no excuse”. Luckey publicly accepted Bosworth’s apology, pointing out that, eight years later, the people responsible for his “ouster and internal/external smear campaign” aren’t even at Meta anymore.
A few days before Bosworth’s apology, Mark Zuckerberg personally invited Palmer Luckey to demo the Orion prototype. Zuckerberg also gave a statement to Tablet Magazine as part of a feature on Luckey’s life and career so far. He said he had “a huge amount of respect” for Luckey, that he was “fun to work with”, claimed he was “sad when his time at Meta came to an end”, and said he hoped they “can find ways to work together in the future”. Now, that future is arriving.
David Heaney
“Meta has spent the last decade building AI and AR to enable the computing platform of the future,” said Mark Zuckerberg in a prepared statement released today. “We’re proud to partner with Anduril to help bring these technologies to the American servicemembers that protect our interests at home and abroad.”
“The world is entering a new era of computing that will give people access to limitless intelligence and extend their senses and perception in ways that have never been possible before,” said Andrew Bosworth in the same statement. “Our national security benefits enormously from American industry bringing these technologies to life.”
“I am glad to be working with Meta once again.” said Palmer Luckey. “Of all the areas where dual-use technology can make a difference for America, this is the one I am most excited about. My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers, and the products we are building with Meta do just that.”
