On Thursday, Anduril and Meta introduced information that looks like a fairy story ending for Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey. The two corporations are working collectively to construct prolonged actuality (XR) gadgets for the U.S. navy, Anduril introduced in a weblog publish.
“I’m glad to be working with Meta as soon as once more,” Luckey is quoted as saying within the publish. “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) Next program, previously known as the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) Next. IVAS was an enormous navy contract, with a complete $22 billion price range, initially awarded to Microsoft in 2018 supposed to develop HoloLens-like AR glasses for troopers.
But after infinite issues, in February the Army 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, wished to faucet into the doubtless profitable world of navy VR/AR/XR headsets, it might have to undergo Anduril.
The gadgets will probably be primarily based on tech out of Meta’s AR/VR analysis heart Reality Labs, the publish says. They’ll use Meta’s Llama AI mannequin, and they’ll faucet into Anduril’s command and management software program often known as Lattice. The concept is to offer troopers with a heads-up show of battlefield intelligence in actual time.
Luckey is seemingly feeling good about this reconciliation. He was, after all, famously fired from Facebook in 2017, about three years after Facebook 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 will probably 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 give attention to constructing software program first.
“All of them had labored with me for years through 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 centered on successful a pissing contest over the way forward for AR/VR, on proving that I used to be proper and the individuals who fired me have been mistaken,” Luckey tweeted in February after successful the IVAS contract.
After Thursday’s information, Luckey posted on X: “It is fairly cool to have all the things at our fingertips for this joint effort – all the things I made earlier than Meta acquired Oculus, all the things we made collectively, and all the things we did on our personal after I used to be fired.”
And to indicate that Luckey has actually buried the hatchet, he stated Anduril has even launched a Facebook web page.
