Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey, after selling his main brainchild to Mark Zuckerberg in 2017, founded Anduril Industries, a company focused on creating robotic military equipment and related solutions in the field of augmented reality. Now it will take over Microsoft’s obligations to supply the Pentagon with augmented reality helmets.
Image source: Microsoft
Since 2018, Microsoft has been trying to create IVAS augmented reality helmets for the US Department of Defense, which were based on the civilian HoloLens headset. The US military expected to purchase more than 120,000 of these helmets, but the high cost of one helmet frankly confused the potential customer, since it should have been reduced from the current $80,000. Taking into account development costs, the project budget reached $21.9 billion.
It is difficult to predict how successfully Anduril Industries will be able to fulfill its obligations under this contract, but now this company will be responsible for the development, production and delivery of IVAS augmented reality helmets to the American armed forces. Palmer Luckey could not resist mentioning the new advanced functionalities that his company will be able to provide these devices with, but did not go into details for reasons of secrecy. Even during the period of Microsoft’s leadership, these helmets had thermal imagers and a machine vision system that allows for real-time recognition of objects and warning soldiers on the battlefield of approaching threats. Naturally, the mapping service was also involved.
In fact, the transfer of rights and obligations from Microsoft to Anduril still requires approval from the US Department of Defense, but the former company will not leave the project completely, as it will continue to provide cloud services for data processing and storage. It is also difficult to say with certainty whether the long-term project will be preserved under the new US political leadership.