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Title: Meta and Anduril Work On Mixed Reality Headsets For the Military

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/0015...

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."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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