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Anduril Industries on Monday detailed its new EagleEye family of artificial intelligence-powered augmented reality headsets, with the company building a variant for its work on the Army’s Soldier Borne Mission Command (SBMC) program.
The company will showcase two versions of the capability at this week’s Association of the U.S. Army conference in Washington, D.C., with Anduril founder Palmer Luckey telling reporters he envisions building an ecosystem of partners for EagleEye.
“My goal and my dream is maybe 10 years from now that there are dozens of different providers who are making EagleEye-compatible headsets and they’re all able to share a common architecture, common data format and a lot of the same interconnects around energy and data transmission,” Luckey said in a recent briefing. “If we’re able to do that, then 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.”
The Army in September selected Anduril-led team and startup firm Rivet to build prototype hardware for SBMC, its follow-on effort to the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) (Defense Daily, Sept. 8).
Anduril earlier this year took over for Microsoft [MSFT] as the prime contractor for the original IVAS program, while that effort has been rebranded as SBMC-Architecture, or SBMC-A, and is now focused on the software and integration piece rather than the headsets themselves.
Luckey has said previously that Anduril invested “hundreds of millions” into EagleEye as it anticipated the Army’s requirement for a next-generation heads-up display system.
“It was one of the very first things we started investing in, primarily building the software backend that would be able to properly feed a combat heads up display,” he said.
While EagleEye is the basis of Anduril’s offering for the SBMC headset, he noted the company has three other variants that are outside the scope of that program’s current requirements and that versions differ in their level of ballistics protection and a focus between day or night capability.
“I know, for example, an Army rotary wing pilot is going to need a totally different system than a guy who’s kicking in doors and he’s going to need something different than a logistician or a loadmaster. So EagleEye is kind of this platform that has multiple instantiations of hardware,” Luckey said.
The two variants at the AUSA conference will be the SBMC-Oriented version, which uses Oakley’s new standard issue augmented glasses “that are extremely lightweight” and which has the compute power contained within the helmet, and a second version designed with full-face ballistic enclosure for comprehensive blast protection and a night-focused mixed reality reprojection system.
Luckey said he would refer to what’s being worked on for SBMC as the current “primary variant” for EagleEye “given it has the clearest path to deployment at a large scale with a large customer,” adding that “large scale” likely means hundreds of thousands of units.”
“I have no doubt in my mind that everybody’s going to buy small numbers of AR headsets. The real prize here, though, is to make this proliferated so that everybody is using this tied together with platforms like [Next-Gen Command and Control] so that they can command and control everything,” Luckey said.
While the SBMC program is currently geared toward delivering a headset capability for the close combat force, Luckey added he believes the program could eventually encompass headset technologies that meet requirements for other Army roles.
Luckey declined to offer specifics on the other two EagleEye variants, noting Anduril is working on them with a non-Army customer and that their designs are “a little bit more in flux.”
Anduril on Monday said EagleEye is designed to provide users with mission planning capability, enhanced perception, heightened survivability and edge connectivity.
“EagleEye is a consequential step toward realizing Anduril’s vision of turning every warrior into a connected node on the battlefield. It consolidates mission planning, perception and control of unmanned assets into a lightweight system that reduces weight and cognitive load while improving protection,” Anduril said in a statement. “Operators can rehearse missions, coordinate movements and integrate live video feeds pinned to terrain. This creates a shared operational picture before and during the mission.”
Anduril’s partners on EagleEye include Meta [META], Qualcomm [QCOM] on the display engine side and the processing side, and Gentex’s [GNTX] Ops-Core on ballistic protection with Luckey telling reporters the company plans to announce more partners over the next year, “primarily consumer and commercial-focused augmented reality companies.”
“In general, it’s a platform that we’re working with a lot of different vendors on [and] that we want other people to build too. So the goal is not that we’re building every component, it’s that we’re building a platform that other vendors can work with us on,” Luckey said. “EagleEye, I hope, is a platform for lots of other hardware to plug into. Think about it this way, I want to make the hardware portion of SBMC as modular and vendor-agnostic as the software is intended to be.”
