Anduril has teamed up with Meta to develop XR products, starting with the EagleEye VR/AR helmet. Palmer Luckey’s defense company says that the two companies will “design and build a range integrated XR devices to provide warfighters enhanced perception and allow intuitive control of autonomous platform on the battlefield”. Palmer Luckey, who was fired by Facebook for his work at Oculus in 2017, founded Anduril. Lattice, the core product of the company, is a software that integrates data from multiple platforms including Anduril as well as third-party assets to provide a unified vision of the entire battlefield, highlighting the most important events and targets.
The company also produces and sells a range of unmanned system that use Lattice. This includes sentry towers (also known as sentry drones), loitering munitions and cruise missiles. Anduril’s recent valuation was $28 billion. The announcement of the Meta partnership came three months after Anduril had announced its involvement in the US Army’s IVAS program (Integrated Visual Augmentation System), which aims at equipping every soldier with a helmet capable of vastly expanding their situational awareness during combat. This is replacing Microsoft’s HoloLens-customized solution. Anduril has already submitted a joint white paper to the US Army for its next version of the program, which is now called SBMC (Soldier-Borne Mission Command). Palmer Luckey stated in
that Anduril’s headset, EagleEye is an “integrated ballisticshell” and described the superhuman abilities it will provide soldiers. Luckey confirmed in an interview with AshleeVance, a veteran tech reporter, that the Meta partnership had been in development for over a year and that the EagleEye Helmet is the first product developed jointly. Although the two companies are yet to reveal which Meta XR technologies they will use in EagleEye helmet, Luckey mentions Metas “multi-billion-dollar” bet on developing “optical-grade Silicon carbide optics” that achieve previously impossible levels of field-of-view and acuity”. Silicon carbide, or
for short, is the material used to make the lenses on Meta’s 11001010 that allows it to achieve 70-degree diagonal fields of view with a thin form factor. The production of optical-grade Silicon carbide is complex and expensive. There is also no commercial supply chain. Meta explained at Connect 2024 why Orion would need to cost more than $10,000 to be sold as a commercial product. This pricing range is within what the military would be willing pay. Anduril’s and Meta’s ability to build a large-scale silicon carbide supply chain could help bring the price down over time. This will also accelerate its adoption by consumers. Anduril can benefit from the partnership if it gains access to the technologies Meta invested billions in developing, such as the world-class AR Lens Designs. Meta may also find that a supply chain is more viable than expected. This will allow it to deliver AR glasses which are up to Orion’s standards sooner than anticipated. Meta admitted that the first AR glasses it plans to release in 2027 will have glass lenses with a smaller field of vision than Orion. Orion’s lenses won’t be used as the only optical system for EagleEye. Luckey said in Ashlee Vance’s interview that EagleEye can be a modular system that supports “many types” (including those made by other companies) of display systems. I don’t just see it as 10,000 or 20,000. I see it as outfitting all of the armed forces. So everything I do is to build an architecture that can scale to this. Each person is using different sensors, vision systems, and processors, each tailored to a specific mission. Luckey explained. Palmer Luckey working again with Meta would have seemed unimaginable a few decades ago. Luckey started Anduril Industries after he left Facebook
, his previous company, in 2012. This previous company was the one that spawned consumer VR and eventually became Meta’s Reality Labs Division. Luckey was fired after it was revealed that he gave $10,000 to Nimble America. This non-profit had at the time created a single billboard that featured a caricature Hillary Clinton with the caption “Too Large to Jail”. Luckeys donation, which was reported to be funding online trolls as well as racist memes by the
website, was a false report. Luckey, who was under a great deal of pressure from Facebook staff, many of whom believed the claims, was fired. Mark Zuckerberg responded, “I can commit that it was not due to political views” during a US Senate Hearing in 2018. In a conversation with John Carmack and Luckey a little over a year earlier, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said that Luckey wasn’t fired because of his political views, but admitted he had been “working from secondhand information”. (Bosworth, at the time, was not associated with Oculus). Bosworth told Luckey that, after he had “dug in” to the firing, he found out that he’d been “misinformed”. However, he added that this was not an excuse. Luckey publiclyacceptedBosworth’s apology, pointing out that, eight years later, the people responsible for his “ouster and internal/external smear campaign” aren’t even at Meta anymore. Mark Zuckerberg personally invited Luckey a few weeks before the public apologize to demo the Orion protoype. Zuckerberg made a statement in Tablet Magazine, as part of a feature about Luckey’s life and career to date. He said that Luckey had a “huge amount of respect”, that he enjoyed working with him and that his time at Meta was over. He ended by expressing his hope that they would “find ways to collaborate in the future”. This future is now here. Mark Zuckerberg, in a prepared release today, said that Meta spent the last decade working on AI and AR technologies to enable the computing platforms of the future. We’re proud of our partnership with Anduril, which will help us bring these technologies directly to American servicemembers protecting our interests in the United States and abroad. American industry is a huge asset to our national security. This is my favorite area where dual-use technologies can help America. I have been on a mission to transform warfighters into technomancers for years, and the products that we are developing with Meta accomplish this.