Meta and Anduril Work On Mixed Reality Headsets For the Military

In a full-circle moment for Palmer Luckey, Meta and his defense tech company Anduril are teaming up to develop mixed reality headsets for the U.S. military under the Army's revamped SBMC Next program. The collaboration will merge Meta's Reality Labs hardware and Llama AI with Anduril's battlefield software, marking Meta's entry into military XR through the very company founded by Luckey after his controversial departure from Facebook. 'I am glad to be working with Meta once again,' Luckey said in a blog post. 'My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers, and the products we are building with Meta do just that.' TechCrunch reports: This partnership stems from the Soldier Borne Mission Command (SBMC) Next program, formerly called the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) Next. IVAS was a massive military contract, with a total $22 billion budget, originally awarded to Microsoft in 2018 intended to develop HoloLens-like AR glasses for soldiers. But after endless problems, in February the Army stripped management of the program from Microsoft and awarded it to Anduril, with Microsoft staying on as a cloud provider. The intent is to eventually have multiple suppliers of mixed reality glasses for soldiers.

All of this meant that if Luckey's former employer, Meta, wanted to tap into the potentially lucrative world of military VR/AR/XR headsets, it would need to go through Anduril. The devices will be based on tech out of Meta's AR/VR research center Reality Labs, the post says. They'll use Meta's Llama AI model, and they will tap into Anduril's command and control software known as Lattice. The idea is to provide soldiers with a heads-up display of battlefield intelligence in real time. An Anduril spokesperson tells TechCrunch that the product family Meta and Anduril are building is even called EagleEye, which will be an ecosystem of devices. EagleEye is what Luckey named Anduril's first imagined headset in Anduril's pitch deck draft, before his investors convinced him to focus on building software first. After the announcement, Luckey said on X: 'It is pretty cool to have everything at our fingertips for this joint effort -- everything I made before Meta acquired Oculus, everything we made together, and everything we did on our own after I was fired.'

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