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Anduril, the military tech company founded by Oculus creator Palmer Luckey, has announced the first hardware to come out of its recent partnership with Meta: EagleEye, an AI-powered mixed-reality (MR) system designed to be built into soldiers’ helmets.
The modular hardware is a “family of systems,” according to Anduril’s announcement, including a heads-up display, spatial audio, and radio frequency detection. It can display mission briefings and orders, overlay maps and other information during combat, and control drones and military robotics.
“We don’t want to give service members a new tool—we’re giving them a new teammate,” says Luckey. “The idea of an AI partner embedded in your display has been imagined for decades. EagleEye is the first time it’s real.”
Anduril, which also manufactures border control tech, lethal drones, and military aircraft, has been developing EagleEye since its inception, and already provides software for the Army’s existing MR goggles, based on Microsoft’s HoloLens hardware.
Just two buds, hanging out, having fun, building AI-powered military hardware for profit. Image: Anduril
Its partnership with Meta was announced this May, and the company told TechCrunch at the time that the collaboration was to develop EagleEye. It’s a reunion of sorts for Luckey and Mark Zuckerberg, after Meta purchased Luckey’s then-start-up Oculus in 2014 and fired the founder three years later.
“I am glad to be working with Meta once again,” Luckey said in a blog post at the time. “My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers, and the products we are building with Meta do just that.”