Palmer Luckey is indeed at the forefront of an exciting technological advancement. Not surprising given that his own defense company, Anduril, has partnered with Meta to produce mixed reality devices for the U.S. military. This would represent a transformative shift by the U.S. Army, who recently decided to reassign the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) program from Microsoft to Anduril. This unexpected partnership represents a watershed moment for military technology contracts. The IVAS program began with a budget of $22 billion. Its aim, however, is to push the technology much further towards creating augmented reality goggles for the soldiers on the battlefield a la Microsoft’s Hololens.
Since starting with Oculus, Luckey’s ride hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing. His vocal support of Donald Trump during the 2016 election was the catalyst for a national uprising and unprecedented public scrutiny of his actions. His stated priorities now seem solidly aimed at speeding technological advantages through smart collaborations into the fight. In 2018, Microsoft was awarded the IVAS contract. After a February re-evaluation, the Army chose to move overall program management to Anduril, with Microsoft retained as a cloud provider.
“All of them had worked with me for years via Oculus VR, and when they saw the EagleEye headset in our first Anduril pitch deck draft, they pointed out that it seemed like I was sequencing things irrationally,” said Luckey. “They believed, correctly, that I was too focused on winning a pissing contest over the future of AR/VR, on proving that I was right and the people who fired me were wrong.”
The EagleEye headset was first used as a component of Anduril’s pitch to the Army at Dragonfly. Luckey’s colleagues warned that inverting the order of development. They proposed he was more concerned with doing things to prove a point than finding practical solutions. Now, Anduril and Meta are teaming up to combine their strengths. Collectively, they are primed to change the game for extended reality (XR) technology in military use cases.
Luckey shared his enthusiasm to be tapping into all the resources at the disposal of both companies.
“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,” he added.
Palmer Luckey of Anduril Industries thinks that this new partnership goes beyond just technological advancement. It fits like a glove with his dream of empowering individual soldiers with state-of-the-art technology.
“I am glad to be working with Meta once again. My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers, and the products we are building with Meta do just that,” he stated.