• by Colin Kirkland , Yesterday

Almost a decade after Palmer Luckey was fired from Facebook, the Oculus founder’s new company Anduril has signed a deal with Meta and the U.S. military to build extended reality (XR) devices designed to “provide warfighters with enhanced perception,” according to a recent statement from Anduril. 

Meta and Anduril’s partnership stems from the $22 billion budget IVAS (Integrated Visual Augmentation System) military contract originally given to Microsoft in 2018 for the development of specialized augmented reality (AR) glasses for soldiers. Due to years of setbacks, the Army redirected control over the project to Anduril, making Microsoft a cloud provider instead.

Luckey’s Oculus startup was originally purchased from Facebook for $2 billion in 2014, which paved the way for Meta’s Reality Labs division and evolving XR product line, including its Meta Quest headsets and Ray-Ban smart glasses. However, Luckey was fired three years later due to corporate tension resulting from his public support of President Donald Trump. 

Now, Luckey will work with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg under new circumstances. 

In this current iteration of the U.S. Army’s program (now called SBMC (Soldier-Borne Mission Command), Anduril and Meta will join forces, pairing technology developed in Meta’s Reality Labs research center -- including Meta’s Llama AI model -- with Lattice, Anduril’s battlefield-intelligence command and control system to build an ecosystem of devices called “EagleEye.”

According to an interview Luckey conducted on Thursday with tech reporter Ashlee Vance, the first EagleEye product is an AR helmet that will use Meta’s Orion glasses prototype, which features “optical-grade silicon carbide optics” that can achieve “heretofore impossible levels of field of view and acuity.”

The material is too expensive to produce for the development of a consumer-first product, but is affordable for the U.S. military. Even so, Luckey says that EagleEye is being designed to support “many different types” of display options -- “different sensors, different vision systems, different processors that are tailored to [militaries’] specific mission.”

“It is pretty cool to have everything at our fingertips for this joint effort,” Luckey recently posted on X. “Everything I made before Meta acquired Oculus, everything we made together, and everything we did on our own after I was fired.”