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Palmer Luckey and Mark Zuckerberg never quite cracked virtual reality headsets for consumers, but they’re taking another crack at it with the US military as their new audience. On Monday, Luckey’s military tech company Anduril announced its AI-powered mixed reality system EagleEye, which will put hardware right into the helmets of Army soldiers and provide them with a heads-up display to view information in real-time.
“We don’t want to give service members a new tool—we’re giving them a new teammate,” Palmer Luckey, Anduril’s founder, said in a statement. “The idea of an AI partner embedded in your display has been imagined for decades. EagleEye is the first time it’s real.”
According to Anduril, EagleEye is a modular system that includes configurations for helmets, visors, and glasses. The company also claims its system will balance weight by reducing the “bulk of traditional night vision goggles” while introducing sensors “aligned with a warfighter’s center of gravity.”
The helmet module, notably, gives soldiers tactical cat ears. Frankly, we live in a time where it’s entirely impossible to know if that is the most efficient design for the effort or if it’s just another CEO with the sense of humor of a 13-year-old doing a multi-million dollar meme, a la Elon Musk running a government project named after a memecoin or making Tesla models spell out the word “SEXY.” Luckey used the announcement that his company was taking over a multi-billion-dollar mixed-reality goggles contract with the Army earlier this year to re-create his famous and meme-ified TIME Magazine cover, so it’s not like he’s above that kind of thing.
The heads-up display is perhaps the most marketable part of Anduril’s project, which was made in part with the help of Mark Zuckerberg and Meta, and the company showed it off with a preview video that looks like it was ripped right out of Call of Duty. The display will reportedly give soldiers access to information like mission briefings, map overlays, and real-time insights like identifying the positioning of other actors in the field.
EagleEye is something of a culmination of Anduril’s work on the Army’s Soldier Borne Mission Command (SBMC) and Soldier Borne Mission Command–Architecture (SBMC-A) programs, which is a rebrand of the Integrated Visual Augmentation System the company took over from Microsoft. Last month, the Army announced that Luckey’s Anduril and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta received contracts from the Army to produce prototype mixed-reality combat goggles. We’ll see if they have any other plans to UwU-fiy the military.
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Source: Gizmodo