Despite spending billions of dollars to make it happen, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Oculus founder Palmer Luckey were never able to make virtual reality a profitable consumer product. Teamed up again, the pair have found an audience that is more comfortable with spending lots of money for slow development timelines and little return: the US Army. According to a report from Bloomberg, Luckey’s Anduril Industries and Zuck’s Meta Platforms were among three companies tapped to produce prototypes for mixed-reality style combat goggles.
The project—which also invited a company called Rivet Industries that is headed up by the former Head of Mixed Reality at Palantir to participate, in case you were worried they couldn’t assemble the full Axis of Evil for this thing—will seek to build upon the Army’s massive, multi-billion dollar Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) project that it launched with Microsoft. The goal is to ultimately create “new helmet-mounted mixed reality systems.”
The IVAS project will certainly be familiar to Luckey’s crew at Anduril, which took over the project after Microsoft effectively abandoned its VR/AR ambitions entirely—but not before handing over a demo product that an Army participant said “would have gotten us killed.” Just what they have done with it since taking over isn’t clear, though the project did get re-named to “Soldier Borne Mission Command” (SBMC), so that’s something.
There does seem to be quite a bit of information that will help inform the new goggles project. Anduril claimed that it will be guided by “over 260,000 hours of soldier feedback from the IVAS program,” which comes after the Army poured $1.36 billion into research, development, prototypes, according to Bloomberg. Seems like a lot of that information will be on what *not* to do, but that’s a start.
The project also appears as though it’ll make good on Zuckerberg and Luckey’s promised return to collaboration after a nasty falling out in 2017. Earlier this year, the two Trumped-up tech bros promised to make “the world’s best” AR and VR technology for the U.S. military under what they called “Project EagleEye.” The expectation was that the pair would make a joint bid for an Army contract that would be worth about $100 million. While the details on this latest deal weren’t made public by Anduril, the company did announce that Meta was a part of its bid and would be involved in the development of the goggles. Rival Rivet Industries said its contract was valued at around $195 million, per Bloomberg. So, it seems we may have a match.
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