When Palmer Luckey was working on virtual reality headsets at his startup Oculus VR in the mid-2010s, he often imagined a future in which American soldiers used the technology to heighten their senses on the battlefield.
That vision has almost become a reality thanks to a deal that will see software from his defense startup, Anduril, implemented in a U.S. military head-mounted display developed by Microsoft.
“The idea is to enhance the soldiers,” Luckey tells WIRED over Zoom from his home in Newport Beach, Calif. “Their visual perception, their auditory perception — basically, to give them all the vision that Superman has and more, and make them more lethal.”
Luckey co-founded Anduril in 2017 after selling Oculus VR to Facebook for $2 billion. His modern company aims to challenge incumbent defense contractors by moving quickly and efficiently, focusing more on software and adapting technology from the tech industry for military applications.
While Anduril is best known for drones and air defense, 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 in Integrated Visual Enhancement 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 a user’s view of the real world.
Lattice will display much more live information—taken from drones, ground vehicles, or air defense systems—to soldiers wearing IVAS. That would include data showing the movement of drones and loitering munitions, electronic warfare attacks, and autonomous systems, Anduril says. For example, that could alert them to incoming drones out of their line of sight that have been detected by air defense systems.
Luckey notes that he wasn’t the first person to imagine such futuristic combat scenarios. As is often the case, he drifts between science fiction and reality without much pause. “It’s a classic science fiction concept,” Luckey says. “Robert Heinlein was the one who pioneered the use of heads-up displays for infantry in a 1950s novel. Space Soldiers.”
The Anduril cofounder certainly looks like a modern kind of defense tech executive, dressed in his customary Hawaiian shirt and bold mullet-and-goatee combo. But he’s confident in his ability to disrupt. “I think I’m one of the smartest people in VR,” he says. “And if that sounds arrogant, remember that it takes arrogance to start a company like Anduril.”
When Anduril was founded, some scoffed at the idea of Silicon Valley engineers mastering military technology. But with the Pentagon’s growing interest 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” fighter robot for the U.S. Air Force and Navy.