Anduril
- Anduril Industries launched EagleEye, a suite of vision products for the military, on Monday.
- EagleEye is powered by Anduril’s AI software platform, Lattice, and uses Meta’s augmented reality technology.
- The tools are a continuation of the work Luckey did as a former Facebook employee.
Autonomous weapons manufacturer Anduril Industries unveiled a suite of vision products for soldiers, called EagleEye, on Monday.
EagleEye will be available as helmets, visors, and glasses. It will feature a display that Anduril says can overlay information, like the locations of a user’s teammates, onto their live battlefield surroundings, according to a press release. EagleEye will be powered by Lattice, Anduril’s AI software platform.
Anduril is also collaborating on the EagleEye product line with several companies, including Meta Platforms, OSI, Qualcomm Technologies, and Gentex Corporation, which have expertise in augmented reality, ballistic helmets, and other related fields, according to the press release.
The rip-roaring success of Anduril, last publicly valued at $30.5 billion in June, has become a bellwether of defense tech’s ascendancy — and a catalyst for Silicon Valley to pour billions into drone and munitions startups. And Washington, DC, is taking notice, too: Earlier this year, President Donald Trump called Anduril’s Roadrunner drone a “nasty looking thing” at a press conference.
In May, Anduril announced it’s building extended reality gear with Meta, thawing nearly a decade’s worth of beef between Anduril founder Palmer Luckey and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Luckey — who joined Facebook, now Meta, after selling his virtual reality startup Oculus — was ousted from the tech behemoth in 2017 after donating $10,000 to a pro-Trump meme group. (Meta and Zuckerberg have denied that Luckey departed due to politics.) During Trump 2.0, though, Zuckerberg has cozied up to the president, appearing at his inauguration and a recent White House dinner alongside fellow tech CEOs.
“One of the very first things that we pitched to investors was that we were going to build was tactical augmented reality displays,” Luckey told reporters at a press briefing on October 8. “My investors at the time told me that I could not put all our eggs in that basket because they believed it was an extension of a pissing contest I had with Mark Zuckerberg as to how to build the best augmented reality glasses. They were somewhat right.”
Meta is contributing the “waveguide and display technology” to EagleEye, Luckey said. The partnership has also afforded Luckey access to Meta’s virtual reality intellectual property, some of which Luckey himself developed at Oculus. “I now have all my toys back,” he said. “Everything that I did before I sold the company, everything I did while I was at Meta, and everything that they did afterward — all of it is on the table for EagleEye.”
Luckey also added that the supply chain for this part of Meta’s tech is “outside of China,” and “a lot of it is US-based,” although he wouldn’t elaborate on the specific location. “We’re quite aligned with the US military goals of not being dependent on China,” he said.
Before Anduril, Microsoft was working on military smart goggles, but, in February, the tech giant handed over the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) program to Anduril, which assumed “oversight of production, future development of hardware and software, and delivery timelines.” In September, the US Army awarded Anduril a $159 million contract for what was formerly known as IVAS Next, now the Soldier Borne Mission Command program, to prototype EagleEye.
Microsoft’s IVAS headset had its fair share of hurdles: An internal Army report said the goggles failed the majority of a military test, and that their glow could be seen from hundreds of meters away, which could have potentially endangered soldiers wearing them. The device also lagged behind schedule, Business Insider reported in 2022. And some soldiers experienced nausea and headaches after testing the goggles, according to Bloomberg.
Luckey is confident that his technical prowess will prevent such pitfalls: “I don’t want to sound arrogant here,” Luckey said, “but I’ve got this shit figured out.”
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