When Palmer Luckey was building virtual reality headsets at his startup Oculus VR in the mid-2010s, he sometimes imagined a future in which American soldiers would use the technology to enhance their senses on the battlefield.
That vision has now all but become reality after a deal that will see software from his defense startup Anduril applied to a head-mounted display for the U.S. military, developed by Microsoft.
“The idea is to enhance soldiers,” Luckey tells WIRED via Zoom from his home in Newport Beach, California. “Their visual perception, auditory perception—basically give them all the vision that Superman has, plus a little bit more, and make them more lethal.”
Luckey co-founded Anduril in 2017, after selling Oculus VR to Facebook for a reported $2 billion. His new company aimed to challenge incumbent defense contractors by moving quickly and efficiently, focusing more on software and adapting tech industry technologies for military use.
While Anduril is primarily known for drones and air defense, Anduril’s core offering is Lattice, a software suite that powers these tools and a platform that integrates with third-party systems. Today’s announcement brings Lattice to the Integrated Visual Augmentation System headset. Developed by Microsoft for the U.S. Army in 2021, IVAS is based on the company’s Hololens system and is an augmented reality display that combines virtual information with the user’s view of the real world.
Lattice will surface much more live information, from drones, ground vehicles or air defense systems, to soldiers wearing IVAS. This would include data showing the movement of drones and ordnance, electronic warfare attacks and the activities of autonomous systems, Anduril says. For example, it could warn them of incoming drones outside their visual range that have been detected by an air defense system.
Luckey notes that he was far from the first to envision such futuristic combat scenarios. As is often the case, he floats between science fiction and reality without much pause. “This is a classic science fiction concept,” Luckey says. “Robert Heinlein was the one who pioneered the application of heads-up displays to infantry in the 1950s novel Spaceship Troopers.”
The Anduril co-founder certainly looks like a new breed of defense tech executive, with his usual Hawaiian shirt and a striking hairstyle of both a mullet and a goatee. But he’s confident he can shake things up. “I think I’m one of the smartest people in the VR industry,” he says. “And if that sounds arrogant, remember that it takes arrogance to start a company like Anduril.”
When Anduril was founded, some scoffed at the idea of Silicon Valley engineers mastering military technology. But as the Pentagon has increasingly embraced low-cost, autonomous, software-defined systems, Anduril has made a name for itself. The startup recently beat out several major companies, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, to win a contract to develop an experimental “collaborative” robotic fighter jet for the U.S. Air Force and Navy.
