Anduril Industries, the military technology company founded by Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey, is working with Microsoft to improve the U.S. Army's mixed reality headsets. The project announced by Anduril will embed the company's Lattice software into the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), allowing the HoloLens-based goggles to provide soldiers with live information from drones, ground vehicles and air defense systems.
Integrating Lattice into IVAS could alert the carrier to threats detected by an air defense system, for example, even if they are out of visual range. “The idea is to support soldiers,” Luckey said in an interview with Wired, “Their visual perception, their auditory perception – it basically gives them the same vision as Superman and more and makes them more deadly.”
Luckey compared the IVAS project to the infantry headsets from Robert Heinlein's 1950s novels. Starship Trooper novel, tell Wired that the headset “is already coming together exactly as the science fiction writers imagined.”
The first IVAS headset developed by Microsoft in 2021 combined integrated thermal and night vision sensors in a head-up display, but reportedly caused headaches, nausea and eyestrain during testing. Microsoft improved the design last year to address these issues and shared Wired that the IVAS platform will be “further refined” after additional testing in early 2025. The U.S. Army had previously stated that it plans to spend up to $21.9 billion over the course of the 10-year IVAS project contract.