In a victory for Palmer Luckey, Meta and Anduril work on mixed reality headsets for the military

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 Next (SBMC) 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 ... Read full article.