When Palmer Luckey was hacking together virtual reality headsets at his startup Oculus VR in the mid-2010s, he would sometimes imagine a future in which US soldiers used the technology to sharpen their battlefield senses.
That vision is now virtually a reality after a deal that will bring software from his defense startup, Anduril, to a US Army head-mounted display developed by Microsoft.
“The idea is to enhance soldiers,” Luckey tells WIRED over Zoom from his home in Newport Beach, California. “Their visual perception, audible perception—basically to give them all the vision that Superman has, and then some, and make them more lethal.”
Luckey cofounded Anduril in 2017, after selling Oculus VR to Facebook for a reported $2 billion. His new company set out to challenge incumbent defense contractors by moving swiftly and efficiently, focusing more on software, and adapting technologies from the tech industry for military use.
While known primarily for drones and air defenses, Anduril’s core offering is Lattice, a suite of software that powers those tools and a platform that can integrate with third-party systems. With today’s announcement, Lattice will be implemented in the Integrated Visual Augmentation System headset. Developed by Microsoft for the US military in 2021 and based on the company’s Hololens system, IVAS is an augmented-reality display that blends virtual information with a user’s view of the real world.
Lattice will surface a lot more live information—pulled from drones, ground vehicles, or aerial defense systems—for soldiers wearing IVAS. This would include data showing the movement of drones and loitering munitions, electronic warfare attacks, and the activities of autonomous systems, Anduril says. It could alert them to incoming drones beyond their visual range that have been detected by an air defense system, for instance.
Luckey notes that he was far from the first person to envision such futuristic combat scenarios. As is often the case, he drifts between science fiction and reality without much pause. “This is a classic sci-fi concept,” Luckey says. “Robert Heinlein was the one who pioneered the application of heads-up displays as applied to infantry in the 1950s novel Starship Troopers.”
The Anduril cofounder certainly looks like a new kind of defense tech executive, wearing his customary Hawaiian shirt and sporting a bold hairstyle combo of both a mullet and a goatee. He is, however, quite confident in his ability to shake things up. “I am one of the smartest people in the VR industry, I think,” he says. “And if that sounds arrogant, remember that it takes arrogance to start a company like Anduril.”
At the time of Anduril’s founding, some people scoffed at the idea of Silicon Valley engineers mastering military technology. But with the Pentagon increasingly keen on low-cost, autonomous, and software-defined systems, Anduril has made a name for itself. The startup recently beat several major companies, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, to win a contract to develop an experimental “collaborative” robotic fighter jet for the US Air Force and Navy.