When Palmer Luckey was creating virtual reality headsets at his startup Oculus VR in the mid-2010s, he sometimes imagined a future in which American soldiers used the technology to heighten their senses on the battlefield.
That vision is now virtually a reality after a deal that will bring software from his defense startup, Anduril, to a U.S. Army head-mounted headset developed by Microsoft.
“The idea is to enhance the soldiers,” Luckey tells WIRED over Zoom from his home in Newport Beach, California. “Their visual perception, auditory perception — basically, giving them all the vision that Superman has, plus some, and making them more lethal.”
Luckey co-founded Anduril in 2017 after selling Oculus VR to Facebook for $2 billion. His new company set out to challenge existing defense contractors by moving quickly and efficiently, focusing more on software and adapting tech industry technologies for military use.
While Anduril is primarily known for its drones and air defenses, its core offering is Lattice, a software suite that powers those tools and a platform that can integrate with third-party systems. With today’s announcement, Lattice will be deployed across Integrated visual augmentation system Headset. Developed by Microsoft for the U.S. military in 2021 and based on the company’s Hololens system, IVAS is an augmented reality display that combines virtual information with the user’s view of the real world.
Lattice will display much more live information — gathered from drones, ground vehicles or air defense systems — to soldiers using 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 drones approaching beyond their visual range that have been detected by an air defense system, for example.
Luckey notes that he was far from the first person to imagine such futuristic combat scenarios. As is often the case, he veers between science fiction and reality without much pause. “This is a classic science fiction concept,” Luckey says. “Robert Heinlein pioneered the application of heads-up displays to infantry in the 1950s novel Starship Soldiers.”
Anduril’s co-founder looks like a new kind of defense technology executive, with his signature Hawaiian shirt and bold hairstyle that combines a mullet haircut and goatee. But he’s fairly confident in his ability to change things. “I think I’m one of the smartest people in the VR industry,” he says. “And if that sounds arrogant, remember that it takes arrogance to start a company like Anduril.”
When Anduril was founded, some people scoffed at the idea of Silicon Valley engineers dominating military technology. But as the Pentagon becomes increasingly interested in low-cost, autonomous, software-defined systems, Anduril has made a name for itself. The startup recently beat out several major companies, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, to win a contract to develop an experimental “collaborative” robotic fighter jet for the U.S. Air Force and Navy.