Anduril Industries is taking the reins of the United States Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) program, and for Palmer Luckey this announcement is deeply personal:
Since my pre-Oculus days as a teenager who had the opportunity to do a tiny bit of work on the Army’s BRAVEMIND project, I’ve believed there would be a headset on every soldier long before there is a headset on every civilian. Given that America loses more troops in training than combat, the Squad Immersive Virtual Trainer (SiVT) side of IVAS alone has the potential to save more lives than practically anything else we can imagine building.
Tactical heads-up-displays that turn warfighters into technomancers and pair us with weaponized robotics were one of the products in the original Anduril pitch deck for a reason. The past eight years we have spent building Lattice have put Anduril in a position to make this type of thing actually useful in the way military strategists and technologists have long dreamed of, ever since Robert Heinlein’s 1959 novel Starship Troopers. Not just day and night and thermal and ultraviolet, but peering into an idealized interactive real-time composite of past, present, and future that will quickly surpass traditional senses like vision and touch. Put another way, Superman doesn’t use menus — he just sees and does.
His announcement includes a paragraph of redacted text, before getting back to his main point:
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.