Meta to work with military contractor Anduril to develop AI-powered augmented-reality tech for use on the battlefield
Meta Platforms is to work with military technology start-up Anduril Industries to develop products using AI and augmented realities, the companies said.
Anduril said the products would provide real-time battlefield intelligence to soldiers in the field.
The products would provide soldiers with “enhanced perception and enable intuitive control of autonomous platforms”, Anduril said.
‘Sci-fi helmet’
The deal reunites Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Anduril, with Meta, which bought his previous gaming company Oculus VR in 2014.
Luckey was later fired from Meta, then Facebook, amidst a controversy over Luckey’s financing a group that created anti-Hillary Clinton memes ahead of the 2016 US presidential election.
Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has since become an ardent supporter of US president Donald Trump, Clinton’s opponent in the earlier election.
Luckey said in an interview with journalist Ashlee Vance that one of the products the two companies would work on was a “sci-fi-style military helmet” that he called “Eagle Eye” and compared to “the helmet from Halo”, referring to a popular video game.
In February Anduril took over a contract from Microsoft to develop a military headset for the Pentagon.
HoloLens successor
Soldiers testing custom HoloLens headsets from Microsoft, referred to by the US Army as its Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), complained of headaches, nausea, and eyestrain and the military later pushed back the date it planned to use such headsets in the field.
Microsoft has not released a new HoloLens model since 2019.
In 2022 Luckey said he hoped to develop a headset called NerveGear that would delivery a “perfect” immersive VR game experience, to the extent of literally killing the wearer when their in-game avatar died.
But he conceded that the NerveGear prototype was really “just a piece of office art”.
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