Palmer Luckey partners with Microsoft to turn US soldiers into Starship Troopers

Anduril Industries, the subject tech institution started by Oculus VR laminitis Palmer Luckey, is teaming up with Microsoft to amended the mixed-reality headsets utilized by the United States Army. The project announced by Anduril volition embed the company’s Lattice bundle into the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), allowing the HoloLens-based goggles to update soldiers with unrecorded accusation pulled from drones, crushed vehicles, and aerial defence systems.

The Lattice integration with IVAS could alert wearers to incoming threats picked up by an aerial defence system, for example, adjacent erstwhile extracurricular of ocular range. “The thought is to heighten soldiers,” Luckey said successful an interrogation with Wired, “Their ocular perception, audible cognition — fundamentally to springiness them each the imaginativeness that Superman has, and past some, and marque them much lethal.” 

Luckey likened the IVAS task to the infantry headsets that featured successful Robert Heinlein’s 1950s Starship Troopers novel, telling Wired that the headset is “already coming unneurotic precisely the mode that the sci-fi authors thought that it would.”

The archetypal IVAS headset developed by Microsoft successful 2021 combined integrated thermal and night-vision imaging sensors into a heads-up display, but reportedly caused headaches, nausea, and eyestrain during testing. Microsoft improved the plan to close these issues past year, and told Wired that the IVAS level volition beryllium “refined further” pursuing further tests taking spot successful aboriginal 2025. The US Army antecedently said it plans to walk up to $21.9 cardinal implicit the 10-year IVAS task contract.