Aduril, a XR company and Meta have forged a partnership under which they will design new VR and AR elements for American military troops. Together they will be designing, building and fielding a variety of integrated XR products which provide warfighters with increased perception and provide intuitive control of autonomous platforms on the battlefield. This would involve a decade of investment by both companies in terms of hardware, software and AI. Now tech will be used for helping the US Defense Forces be extra battle ready in the field.
Meta has already gone ahead and made major advancements in AR and VR technologies with regards to making the key elements compact and more lightweight in order to improve customer utility. Former Meta VR chief Palmer Luckey has founded Anduril which has been working on developing the next generation of military technology.
As of now, both companies will be working on developing a new military headset under its project called EagleEye. In February, Anduril had taken over the development of U.S Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System from Microsoft and has been looking for advancing the project beyond their original vision which had been built upon their HoloLens 2 device.
The version from Anduril would include night vision and thermal sensing along with advanced augmented reality capabilities which is where Meta comes into picture. For his Meta has already gone one step ahead and developed a new range of chips and processing units for its AR glasses model which has made major advancement in compact AR tech.
So what Meta aims to do is to create glasses which can be worn in day to day life which not just looks stylish but also are light weight. Though these things are secondary, what is more important is its processing power which makes association with Anduril more sense.
As per Anduril, these products would be providing real time battlefield intelligence to soldiers on the field which would let them take intelligent decisions based on data. This would change the way how warfighters would see, sense and integrate battlefield information. As per Palmer Luckey, combining Meta expertise in virtual and augmented reality technology would help in saving countless lives and dollars.
Anduril was launched in 2017 and it has been trying to distinguish itself from defense industry contractors due to its ability to fund and develop products rather than tapping federal funding. It has created unmanned autonomous weapons which uses AI for identifying and engaging targets.
On the other hand, Meta has spent the last decade building AI and AR for enabling computing platform of the future. This is not the first time that Meta has hinted at its pivot towards military and defense related programs. Last year, Meta had announced that US government agencies working on national security would get hold of their latest Llama 3 model. As per the company, they are working towards ensuring safety and security of US by working with companies like Amazon, IBM, Lockheed Martin for making Llama available to the government.
Meta has devoted its success to the democratic values and entrepreneurial spirit of US and as a gesture they would like to play its part in supporting the safety, security and economic prosperity of America. This collaboration aims at utilizing the power of AI for streamlining logistics and tracking terrorist financing.
For this purpose, Meta has been recruiting former Pentagon staff in order to get across the defense procurement process. As per Mark Zuckerberg, EagleEye Technology would be helping US soldiers in protecting the nation’s interest both at home and abroad.
Let’s see how this partnership blooms and helps the US in its objectives. Keep checking out this space for more!
