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When Palmer Luckey was hacking together virtual reality headsets at his startup Oculus VR in the mid-2010s, he would sometimes imagine a future in which US soldiers used the technology to sharpen their battlefield senses.
That vision is now virtually a reality after a deal that will bring software from his defense startup, Anduril, to a US Army head-mounted display developed by Microsoft.
“The idea is to enhance soldiers,” Luckey tells WIRED over Zoom from his home in Newport Beach, California. “Their visual perception, audible perception—basically to give them all the vision that Superman has, and then some, and make them more lethal.”
Luckey cofounded Anduril in 2017, after selling Oculus VR to Facebook for a reported $2 billion. His new company set out to challenge incumbent defense contractors by moving swiftly and efficiently, focusing more on software, and adapting technologies from the tech industry for military use.
While known primarily for drones and air defenses, Anduril’s core offering is Lattice, a suite of software that powers those tools and a platform that can integrate with third-party systems. With today’s announcement, Lattice will be implemented in the Integrated Visual Augmentation System headset. Developed by Microsoft for the US military in 2021 and based on the company’s Hololens system, IVAS is an augmented-reality display that blends virtual information with a user’s view of the real world.
Lattice will surface a lot more live information—pulled from drones, ground vehicles, or aerial defense systems—for soldiers wearing IVAS. This would include data showing the movement of drones and loitering munitions, electronic warfare attacks, and the activities of autonomous systems, Anduril says. It could alert them to incoming drones beyond their visual range that have been detected by an air defense system, for instance.
Luckey notes that he was far from the first person to envision such futuristic combat scenarios. As is often the case, he drifts between science fiction and reality without much pause. “This is a classic sci-fi concept,” Luckey says. “Robert Heinlein was the one who pioneered the application of heads-up displays as applied to infantry in the 1950s novel Starship Troopers.”
The Anduril cofounder certainly looks like a new kind of defense tech executive, wearing his customary Hawaiian shirt and sporting a bold hairstyle combo of both a mullet and a goatee. He is, however, quite confident in his ability to shake things up. “I am one of the smartest people in the VR industry, I think,” he says. “And if that sounds arrogant, remember that it takes arrogance to start a company like Anduril.”
At the time of Anduril’s founding, some people scoffed at the idea of Silicon Valley engineers mastering military technology. But with the Pentagon increasingly keen on low-cost, autonomous, and software-defined systems, Anduril has made a name for itself. The startup recently beat several major companies, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, to win a contract to develop an experimental “collaborative” robotic fighter jet for the US Air Force and Navy.
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While virtual and augmented reality headsets remain a tough sell for the general public, Luckey says the US Army has been eager to experiment with the technology, primarily as a training tool but also as a way to deliver information more efficiently in critical situations. “The military is different,” Luckey says. “If you have an augmented-reality display that can make you 20 percent more lethal or make someone 10 percent safer, that’s a bigger improvement than just about any piece of gear you could give you.”
Head-mounted displays are already proving their worth in other areas of the US military. “Augmented reality promises to have a massive impact on how we think about the future of training,” says Dan Robinson, CEO of Red 6, a company that sells an augmented reality display for use aboard jet aircraft.
Robinson adds that augmented-reality training will be crucial to incorporating more autonomous systems into both training exercises and real deployments. “The future will be unmanned and manned working together. The real question is how we get manned and unmanned systems to work together,” he says.
Luckey says that artificial intelligence and autonomy are a big part of the future plan for Lattice. He envisions soldiers using the system to receive information from autonomous systems, and using natural language to converse with them. “One of the things that we've been doing is developing models that are based on a lot of classified information,” he says.
Augmented reality might be popular in military circles, but Microsoft’s IVAS headset has hardly been an advertisement for Silicon Valley brilliance. A US Army report on testing of the system, revealed in press reports in 2022, warned that early users felt nauseous and experienced headaches, even if the Army found that the headset improved mission effectiveness. After fixing issues, however, Microsoft earned a new contract to further develop the technology in 2023. In total, the US Army has said it plans to spend $21.9 billion on the IVAS project.
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Microsoft stated that the issues with IVAS have improved significantly and that the platform would be refined further based on testing expected to take place in early 2025. Anduril did not disclose the terms of its deal with Microsoft.
“There’s a lot of interest in using augmented reality in tactical contexts,” says Douglas Bowman, a professor at Virginia Tech who has developed virtual and augmented reality for the military. Bowman says that the trade-offs between weight and power consumption of wearable devices and their utility remains unclear. He adds that the user experience needs to be refined to reduce distraction and ensure that important information is surfaced. “It’s still in the early days, and there’s going to be some learning to do before those devices are ready to be deployed.”
Collaboration between the tech industry and the US military also remains a hot potato among some Big Tech workers. Employees at Alphabet have repeatedly protested military contracts, with workers at Google DeepMind recently signing an open letter calling on the company to abandon military ties.
Luckey, however, remains an unapologetic and outspoken advocate for working with the Pentagon. He is also unusual among defense executives in posting anime-inspired promotional videos and musings on potentially lethal video game ideas while also penning op-eds on the need for techies to embrace the military. Luckey is also an ardent Donald Trump supporter, but he declined to discuss politics or the US presidential election in our interview.
Luckey is one mercurial billionaire who sees little conflict. In fact, he says, his military daydreams are fast becoming real. “It's already coming together exactly the way that the sci-fi authors thought that it would,” he says.
