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 (SBMC) Next 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 Llama 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, and Matt Grimm.
An Anduril spokesperson tells TechCrunch that the product family Meta and Anduril are building is even called EagleEye, which will be an ecosystem of devices.
EagleEye is what Luckey named Anduril’s first imagined headset in Anduril’s pitch deck draft, before his investors convinced him to focus on building software first.
“All of them had worked with me for years via Oculus VR, and when they saw the EagleEye headset in our first Anduril pitch deck draft, they pointed out that it seemed like I was sequencing things irrationally. They believed, correctly, that I was too focused on winning a pissing contest over the future of AR/VR, on proving that I was right and the people who fired me were wrong,” Luckey tweeted in February after winning the IVAS contract.
After Thursday’s news, Luckey posted on X: “It is pretty cool to have everything at our fingertips for this joint effort – everything I made before Meta acquired Oculus, everything we made together, and everything we did on our own after I was fired.”
And to show that Luckey has really buried the hatchet, he said Anduril has even launched a Facebook page.