On Thursday, Anduril and Meta introduced information that looks like a fairy story ending for Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey. The 2 corporations are working collectively to construct prolonged actuality (XR) gadgets for the U.S. army, Anduril introduced in a weblog put up.
“I’m glad to be working with Meta as soon as once more,” Luckey is quoted as saying within the put up. “My mission has lengthy been to show warfighters into technomancers, and the merchandise we’re constructing with Meta just do that.”
This partnership stems from the Soldier Borne Mission Command (SBMC) Subsequent program, previously known as the Built-in Visible Augmentation System (IVAS) Subsequent. IVAS was an enormous army contract, with a complete $22 billion price range, initially awarded to Microsoft in 2018 meant to develop HoloLens-like AR glasses for troopers.
However after infinite issues, in February the Military stripped administration of this system from Microsoft and awarded it to Anduril, with Microsoft staying on as a cloud supplier. The intent is to ultimately have a number of suppliers of blended actuality glasses for troopers.
All of this meant that if Luckey’s former employer, Meta, needed to faucet into the possibly profitable world of army VR/AR/XR headsets, it could must undergo Anduril.
The gadgets shall be based mostly on tech out of Meta’s AR/VR analysis heart Actuality Labs, the put up says. They’ll use Meta’s Llama AI mannequin, and they’re going to faucet into Anduril’s command and management software program referred to as Lattice. The concept is to supply troopers with a heads-up show of battlefield intelligence in actual time.
Luckey is outwardly feeling good about this reconciliation. He was, after all, famously fired from Fb in 2017, about three years after Fb purchased his startup Oculus for $2 billion. This got here after Luckey was embroiled in a brouhaha over his assist for Donald Trump in his 2016 election. Luckey circled and based Anduril in 2017, with co-founders Brian Schimpf, Trae Stephens, and Matt Grimm.
An Anduril spokesperson tells TechCrunch that the product household Meta and Anduril are constructing is even known as EagleEye, which shall be an ecosystem of gadgets.
EagleEye is what Luckey named Anduril’s first imagined headset in Anduril’s pitch deck draft, earlier than his buyers satisfied him to concentrate on constructing software program first.
“All of them had labored with me for years by way of Oculus VR, and after they noticed the EagleEye headset in our first Anduril pitch deck draft, they identified that it appeared like I used to be sequencing issues irrationally. They believed, appropriately, that I used to be too targeted on profitable a pissing contest over the way forward for AR/VR, on proving that I used to be proper and the individuals who fired me had been unsuitable,” Luckey tweeted in February after profitable the IVAS contract.
After Thursday’s information, Luckey posted on X: “It’s fairly cool to have every thing at our fingertips for this joint effort – every thing I made earlier than Meta acquired Oculus, every thing we made collectively, and every thing we did on our personal after I used to be fired.”
And to indicate that Luckey has actually buried the hatchet, he mentioned Anduril has even launched a Fb web page.
