In a victory for Palmer Luckey, Meta and Anduril work on mixed reality headsets for the military

Summary

On Thursday, Anduril and Meta announced news that feels like a fairy tale ending for Anduril co-founder, Palmer Luckey. The two companies are working together to build extended reality (XR) devices for the U.S. military, Anduril announced in a blog post. “I am glad to be working with Meta once again,” Luckey is quoted as saying in the post. “My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers, and the products we are building with Meta do just that.” This partnership stems from the Soldier Borne Mission Command Next (SBMC) 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 Llma 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. Luckey is apparently feeling good about this reconciliation. He was, of course, famously fired from Facebook in 2017, about three years after Facebook bought his startup Oculus for $2 billion. This came after Luckey was embroiled in a brouhaha over his support for Donald Trump in his 2016 election. Luckey turned around and founded Anduril in 2017, with co-founders Brian Schimpf, Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm. An Anduril spokesperson tells TechCrunch that th...