Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, a VR company that Facebook acquired in 2014, says Zuckerberg’s decision to go all-in on VR and the metaverse has sparked a huge amount of anticipation in the commercial world. “Everyone on their quarterly business phone calls, about a week or two later, is asked by investors, ‘What’s your metaverse game?’” he says.
In 2017, Luckey co-founded the defense company Anduril. He says that despite all the recent metaverse hype, there is great defense potential, in part because military training is so important and costly. But he says the technology doesn’t have to be hyper-realistic to be useful, and he wants Anduril to focus on using the technology only where necessary. “Everything we do with VR is something where it’s uniquely better than any other option,” he says. This includes using VR to train people to operate Anduril’s drones, he says, or to display information about an area using data from sensors on the ground.
As with Zuckerberg’s planned metaverse, newer military systems rely heavily on AI to be effective. In October 2020, the AR technology developed by Red6 was used to pit a real fighter pilot against an aircraft controlled by an AI algorithm developed as part of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) AI dogfighting project. ). The AI top gun, created by another startup called EpiSci, learned how to outsmart and defeat an opponent through a process of trial and error. The AI pilot eventually developed superhuman abilities and was able to defeat his human opponent every time.
Another DARPA project, called Perceptually-enabled Task Guidance, aims to create an AI assistant that watches what a soldier is doing and provides advice through speech, sound, or images. Unlike the augmented reality system developed by Boeing, which only works in a specific environment, such a system should understand the real world. Bruce Draper, the responsible DARPA program manager, says the real value of technologies under investigation by the military lies in merging the real and the virtual. “The metaverse is mostly virtual and virtual worlds are useful for training, but we live in the physical world,” he says. “The military realm is inherently physical, it’s not about an abstract metaverse.”
But attempts to merge the virtual and real worlds ran into problems. In March 2022, a leaked memo from Microsoft revealed that those working on IVAS, the US military’s version of the HoloLens AR headset, expected it to be poorly received by users. And an audit released by the DOD in April 2022 concluded that the US military could be wasting its money as a result. Jason Kuruvilla, a senior communications manager at Microsoft, shared several statements from senior military figures proclaiming the IVAS’s potential. He also pointed to a 2021 DOD report discussing the importance of developing IVAS quickly so that problems can be ironed out along the way.
Such high-profile and expensive efforts have only increased the confidence of those pushing the military metaverse. “I know this is the future of military training,” said Doug Philippone, global defense leader at Palantir, a defense company that has invested in both Anduril and Red6. “But I also see it as the future of the way the military fights and makes decisions. So it’s not just about fighting, it’s about making decisions.”
Luckey says Anduril is already working on technology that could do this in training missions and combat. “The next big step for us, which I’m really excited about, is to get our core product and that data forwarded to heads-up displays that will be able to carry troops on the front lines,” he says.
But how much of this cutting-edge technology makes it to the front lines — or even in training drills — remains unclear. Sorin Adam Matei, a professor at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who has developed virtual battlefield training platforms for the U.S. military, says the technology deployed will often be significantly simpler than metaverse boosters imagine. He suggests that a simpler version of the IVAS headset could eventually be integrated into an AR rifle scope. “When you’re shooting and getting shot at, the last thing you want to worry about is another device,” he says. And technology doesn’t have to be as extensive as a metaverse to be useful. “We need to think a little more about this metaphorical metaphor — which is powerful but also has its limitations.”
