Meta and Anduril Work On Mixed Reality Headsets For the Military (techcrunch.com) 20
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."
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."
Government bribe (Score:2)
I don't think it's quite true anymore because you can't compete with the billionaires. I remember a bitchy multimillionaire woman complaining she couldn't get the time of day from Congress because her bribes weren't big enough.
I wonder how muc
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
And Elon musk (...)
The media really does make you people deranged. No where in this article is Musk or his companies mentioned, but because you're so batshit crazy obsessed with everything the liberal media has you attacking at that moment, you bring him into random unrelated discussion.
Re: (Score:2)
Whats your point other than an opportunity to randomly insult someone online?
Yes musk is the example being used here, which is a little out of context, but the point is solid, politics, particularly under this current government, but also unde
So AR only then (Score:1)
VR is for simulators exclusively. MR/XR are gimmicky busted crap.
Dang (Score:1)
Thanks Bush, thanks Putin, for sending that dream back decades. Above all, thanks Henry Kissinger.
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My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers
That is the most disgusting thing that I've read all week.
Progress (Score:2, Flamebait)
So Zuck is going from exploiting people to killing them. I guess that's progress.
Ask MSFT how it worked for them.... (Score:5, Informative)
Not well, according to my friends in the Army...
Re: (Score:1)
This is just tech bros looking for government handouts, after the consumer AR/VR market basically evaporated. Product looking for a use case.
Re: (Score:2)
"The government" might have a pretty good idea of what it wants, but the Pentagram has no clue and has amply demonstrated this hundreds if not thousands of times since the turn of the century. It's no more able to control its impulses than our toddler president, and any sort of long term planning was rejected long ago.
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These dollar values (order of magnitude) are not made up. The Microsoft hololens VR helmet they tried to sell to the US army was way more expensive than that, and failed due to cost/benefit being way off. And drones worth that much have been hunting and killing soldiers for the last couple of years.
Your assumptions that cost/benefit is done before procurement is naive. The truth is that US defense procurement costs always blow up and the benefit side of the equation is always a WAG because the world doesn
god damn it (Score:2, Insightful)
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Don't ask me, my military-grade, AI-powered, augmented reality day-and-night vision goggles company is called "Bombadil Vision".
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Why is that blasphemous? Tolkien wrote about what was essentially the divine right of kings to muster their nations and lead militaries against an evil empire and a quisling. The whole bit at the end about Wormtongue taking over the Shire was a way to say that destroying the One Ring by itself wasn't enough to defeat evil.
Let me guess (Score:2)