Anduril will display its entry into the Army’s Soldier Borne Mission Command program starting Monday at the AUSA annual meeting, CEO Palmer Lucky told reporters Thursday.
Dubbed Eagle Eye, the program aims to produce four different head sets, two of which will be in the Anduril booth, with two more still in earlier phases of development.
“We’ve been working on augmented-reality technology for warfighters since near the beginning of Anduril,” said Luckey, who invented the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset over a decade ago. “It was one of the very first things that we started investing in, primarily building the software back end that would be able to properly feed a combat heads-up display.”
About two years later, Eagle Eye has variants for day or night operations, or different levels of ballistic protection. Anduril is working with companies like Oakley and Ops Core, but the plan is to integrate even more partners into a headset with modular capabilities that can be customized to the mission.
“I don’t have to have different variants for each type of user,” Luckey said. “I can have one primary thing and then the changes to it are just—well, that guy has somewhat different sensors, those clip on. That guy is using a different display system—he can just use that one instead of the other. So 90-percent commonality is what we’re kind of shooting for with modularity.”
For example, a hyperspectral camera would be a great feature for an explosive ordnance disposal technician looking for bomb residue, but it’s not something every soldier will need. So that EOD specialist can clip one onto Eagle Eye, but there won’t be a universal suite of sensors for everyone.
The Eagle Eye offering that Luckey thinks will be the best contender for SBMC is a set of ballistic augmented-reality glasses that integrate with the helmet, so the processor and battery pack are worn on the helmet rather than in front of the eyes, making them feel much lighter than other VR glasses by distributing the weight around the head.
“I would probably call it the primary variant right now, given that it’s the one that has the clearest path to deployment at large scale with a large customer,” Luckey said. “And when I say large scale, I mean, like the scale I care about, which is hundreds of thousands of units.”
The other variant is “a full-ballistic, full-blast-protection, full-face helmet with a night-focused mixed-reality reprojection system,” he said. “So not optically transparent, because we’re trying to build a ballistic visor that is rifle- and frag-rated across the entire thing, so no slits that people can shoot your eyes through.”
The fully sealed helmet should also offer better protection from traumatic brain injury, he said.
In addition to competing to make the hardware for SBMC, Anduril already has the Soldier Borne Mission Command-Architecture contract to administer the software that controls the headsets.
“My dream is, maybe 10 years from now, that there are dozens of different providers who are making Eagle Eye-compatible headsets, and they’re all able to share a common architecture, common data format, a lot of the same interconnects and standards around energy and data transmission,” he said. “And if we’re able to do that, then I think we’re actually going to get augmented reality to the military in a way that makes it useful for the first time, for people who are actually on the ground.”
