Palmer Luckey Describes How Anduril’s EagleEye Helmet Will Give Soldiers Superhuman Senses – UploadVR

Palmer Luckey described how Anduril’s EagleEye helmet will give soldiers superhuman senses, describing it as “by far the best AR/VR/MR vision augmentation system that has ever been built”.Last week, Anduril announced that it is taking over the US Army’s IVAS program from Microsoft. Anduril is the defence company Luckey founded after being fired from Oculus, and it’s reportedly valued at $28 billion.That initial announcement didn’t come with any specific details on the hardware or capabilities of Anduril’s IVAS solution. But in an interview with former Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan, Luckey revealed the first details of the system as well as its name: EagleEye.Luckey told Ryan that Anduril has been “investing a ton of resources” into the development of EagleEye for “years” now, long before it knew it could secure the IVAS contract. A defining tenet of Anduril has been to develop products in advance of offering them to the US government for a fixed price, a stark departure from the approach of legacy defense contractors, who secure contracts to develop hardware with the ability to go over budget.Unlike Microsoft’s HoloLens IVAS, Anduril’s EagleEye is an “integrated ballistic shell”, not something you strap onto existing helmets. The strap-on approach was cumbersome, Luckey explains, leading to imbalances and “snag hazard”.As for that “vision augmentation”, Luckey claims EagleEye will be “by far the best AR/VR/MR vision augmentation system that has ever been built”, with resolution, field of view, and sensors superior to anything else.On the software side, EagleEye will leverage Lattice, Anduril’s original and primary product. Lattice is, at its core, a distributed software system that takes in sensor data from a wide variety of military platforms, including both Anduril and third party assets, and autonomously integrates it to build a unified view of the entire battlespace, while bringing attention to the most salient targets.So what can Lattice running on EagleEye do for soldiers?The first trial Anduril conducted, when it was only set to have Lattice running on HoloLens IVAS, gave soldiers warning of incoming drones, and guidance of how to get to safety from them.Another use case Luckey mentions is marking targets, without the need to use smoke or a laser that enemies can see, as well as the system automatically sharing the position of visible enemies, highlighting them for other soldiers even when out of sight.Because Lattice integrates with a wide range of military platforms, including drones, the source of this kind of shared situational awareness isn’t limited to other EagleEye wearers.And unlike when limited to human intelligence, Lattice can keep track of an effectively unlimited number of potential threats, leveraging all available sensors in the vicinity.Beyond just awareness, Luckey wants Lattice on EagleEye to offer proactive guidance to soldiers, leveraging predictive AI to help save their lives in battle.Further, the Lattice AI would answer questions about what the soldier is seeing, leveraging the same kind of multimodal AI used for civilian purposes in the Ray-Ban Meta glasses and phone apps like ChatGPT.Later in the interview, Luckey muses on the issue of whether to sell EagleEye to civilians, not just the military. He says that while in principle as a libertarian weapons enthusiast he would want to, in practice this would risk falling into the hands of hostile nations.One non-military group that Luckey does seem willing to sell a Lattice-powered head mounted display to though is law enforcement. While he doesn’t think a bulky EagleEye helmet would be appropriate for “most” police, given their need to interact with people face to face, he does see a place for a less advanced product that would “look more like a pair of Oakleys” than a “RoboCop helmet”.The IVAS section of the interview.For a full description of EagleEye, as well as a first hand account of Luckey’s firing by Facebook, influence on PlayStation VR, and views on robotics, exoskeletons, military contractors, China, and more, I recommend watching or listening to the full interview.Get a weekly summary of the most important VR and AR news.Check your inbox to confirm!(it might also be in your spam folder)Sign up to get a weekly summary of the most important VR and AR news, straight to your inbox.Check your inbox to confirm!(it might also be in your spam folder)

Source: https://www.uploadvr.com/palmer-luckey-describes-anduril-eagleeye-helmet-soldiers-superhuman-senses/