On Thursday, Andrill and Meta announced news that felt like a fairy tale ending for Andrill’s co-founder, Palmer Lucky. The two companies are working together to build an augmented reality (XR) device for the US military, Andrill announced in a blog post.
“I’m happy you’re working with Meta again,” Lucky is quoted as saying in the post. “My mission has been to turn warfighters into technomancers for a long time, and the products we build in meta do just that.”
This partnership comes from the Soldier Borne Mission Command (SBMC) Next program, previously known as the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS). IVAS is a large military contract with a total budget of $220 billion, and in 2018 Microsoft originally intended to develop AR glasses like Hololens for soldiers.
However, after endless issues, in February the Army stripped Microsoft of its program management and awarded Anduril, and Microsoft continued as a cloud provider. The intention is to have a mix of multiple suppliers for soldiers and have a supplier of reality glasses.
All this meant that Lucky’s former employer Meta would have to go through Andrill if he wanted to take advantage of the potentially advantageous world of military VR/AR/XR headsets.
The device is based on technology from Meta’s AR/VR Research Center Reality Labs, the post said. They use the Llama AI model of Meta and leverage Anduril’s command and control software known as the lattice. The idea is to provide soldiers with a heads-up display of Battlefield Intelligence in real time.
Lucky clearly feels good about this settlement. Of course, he was fired famously from Facebook in 2017, about three years after Facebook bought startup Oculus for $2 billion. This comes after Lucky was caught up in Bruhaha in the 2016 election over support for Donald Trump. Lucky looks back and founded Andrill in 2017, along with co-founders Brian Simpff, Trae Stevens and Matt Grimm.
A spokesperson for Anduril told TechCrunch that the product family Meta and Andrill are building are also called Eagleeye. This is an ecosystem of devices.
Eagleeye is what Luckey called the headset first imagined in Anduril’s Anduril’s Anduril pitch deck draft.
“They all worked with me for many years via Oculus VR. When I saw the Eagleeye headset on my first Anduril Pitch Deck Draft, they pointed out that I looked like I was irrationally sequencing things, and IVAS contracts.
After Thursday’s news, Lucky posted to X. “It’s pretty cool to put everything on your fingertips for this joint effort. Everything we made before Meta, everything we made together, and everything we did after we were fired.”
And he even said Andrill launched a Facebook page to show that Lucky really filled out hatch.
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