Palmer Luckey says his entire career has led to this moment — scoring a $22 billion US Army contract for high-tech goggles

[Pelican Press 0]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Palmer Luckey says his entire career has led to this moment — scoring a $22 billion US Army contract for high-tech goggles

Palmer Luckey’s Anduril is set to take over

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

’s US Army contract for mixed-reality goggles.

The 10-year contract, worth $22 billion, has been plagued by development issues.

Anduril now has a shot — a moment that Luckey said was part of Anduril’s original vision.

Palmer Luckey just clinched a big personal win — his defense startup, Anduril, is set to take over

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

’s $22 billion contract to make high-tech goggles for the US Army.

Both firms

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

the transition on Tuesday, saying Anduril would spearhead “oversight of production, future development of hardware and software, and delivery timelines” for the

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

program.

The IVAS is meant to give soldiers a headset that uses augmented and visual reality to feed them information on the battlefield in real time. One of its most important functions is to help the wearer identify drones quickly and clearly.

For Luckey, the contract transition is his own watershed moment. In his 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

 on Tuesday, he wrote that the announcement is “deeply personal.”

“Everything I’ve done in my career — building Oculus out of a camper trailer, shipping VR to millions of consumers, getting run out of Silicon Valley by backstabbing snakes, betting that Anduril could tear people out of the bigtech megacorp matrix and put them to work on our nation’s most important problems — has led to this moment,” he wrote.

The move calls back to Luckey’s original foray into the tech industry, when he

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

in 2014 for $2 billion. After being ousted from

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, he started Anduril in 2017, and his defense startup has since delved into drones, AI, and counter-electronic warfare systems for the US military.

In September,

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

and Anduril said they were collaborating on the IVAS program, with Luckey’s firm providing its Lattice software for the headsets.

Now, the entire program is set to be under Anduril’s control.

Luckey wrote in his blog that he’d recognized the combat potential for high-tech goggles since he was a teenager, and that providing them to the US military was part of Anduril’s original pitch deck eight years ago.

Yet Anduril’s size at the time, which he estimated was a team of about a dozen people, hurt its chances at scoring the contract.

“I do believe our crazy pitch could have won this from the start — as things stand, though, there is no time like the present,” Luckey wrote.

The US Army is having a rough time with IVAS

The handover still needs to be approved by the US government. The US Army awarded

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

the 10-year contract in 2021, when the deal was valued at up to $22 billion.

The IVAS program has since faced a tough road in development and testing.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

converted its

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

for military use, but soldiers criticized the devices, complaining of software glitches and side effects like headaches, nausea, and neck strain.

A US Army soldier wearing a prototype IVAS headset.US Army

The feedback prompted the US Army to delay the IVAS program in October 2021, and the systems have been repeatedly retweaked for the battlefield in the years after.

Within

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, the entire HoloLens project appeared to be ailing. Business Insider’s Ashley Stewart reported in 2022 that

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, and that the company had lost billions on its mixed-reality program.

In October 2024,

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

confirmed plans to

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

and cut support for the device, throwing the IVAS program into question.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

’s move tracked with a shift in the entire industry, as tech giants stepped back from developing mixed-reality headsets to instead focus on the AI race.

After

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

’s decision, the US Army hinted in late January that it was surveying the market for a new contender for its 10-year contract,

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

related to the IVAS program.

With Anduril now in the driver’s seat, it’s not immediately clear what hardware it will use for the IVAS. There was no mention of the discontinued HoloLens 2 in its joint statement with

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

.

Instead, the joint statement said that part of Anduril’s deal is to make

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

’s Azure cloud service its “preferred hyperscale cloud” for the IVAS.

As Anduril takes over IVAS, Luckey projected confidence in his blog, writing that he wanted to “turn warfighters into technomancers” through his heads-up displays.

“We have a shot to prove that this long-standing dream is no windmill,” he wrote.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

confirmed to Business Insider that its agreement with Anduril is now pending DoD approval. Anduril did not respond to requests for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.

Read the original article on

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

#Palmer #Luckey #entire #career #led #moment #scoring #billion #Army #contract #hightech #goggles

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

For verified travel tips and real support, visit: https://hopzone.eu/