Palmer Luckey on the Pentagon’s future of mixed reality

MIT Technology Review Narrated

Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR, has set his sights on a new mixed-reality headset customer: the Pentagon.

His company Anduril Industries, which focuses on drones, cruise missiles, and other AI-enhanced technologies for the US Department of Defense, announced it would partner with Microsoft on the US Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), arguably the military’s largest effort to develop a headset for use on the battlefield.

Anduril’s contribution to the project will be Lattice, an AI-powered system that connects everything from drones to radar jammers to surveil, detect objects, and aid in decision-making. It’s a tool that allows soldiers to receive instantaneous information not only from Anduril’s hardware, but also from radars, vehicles, sensors, and other equipment not made by Anduril. Now it will be built into the IVAS goggles. Luckey says the IVAS project is his top priority at Anduril.

If designed well, the device will automatically sort through countless pieces of information—drone locations, vehicles, intelligence—and flag the most important ones to the wearer in real time.

But that’s a big “if.” Though few would bet against Luckey’s expertise in the realm of mixed reality, few observers share his optimism for the IVAS program. They view it, thus far, as an avalanche of failures.

This story was written by AI reporter James O'Donnell and narrated by Noa - newsoveraudio.com.