On Thursday, Anduril Industries and Meta revealed their new partnership, marking a significant milestone, particularly for Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey. The two companies have joined forces to develop extended reality (XR) headsets designed specifically for the U.S. military, according to an announcement made by Anduril.
Speaking about the partnership, Luckey said it was gratifying to collaborate with Meta once again. “My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers, and the products we are building with Meta do just that,” he stated in the company’s release.
The origin of this collaboration lies in the U.S. Army’s Soldier Borne Mission Command Next (SBMC) initiative, previously known as the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) Next. Initially awarded to Microsoft in 2018, this massive $22 billion program aimed at equipping troops with Hololens-style augmented reality devices. However, after persistent hurdles and setbacks, the Army shifted management from Microsoft to Anduril in February, with Microsoft remaining involved primarily as the cloud services provider. The military aims eventually to diversify the supply of mixed-reality gear available to its personnel.
Given the program’s transition to Anduril, Meta needed to engage directly with Luckey’s current company to access this lucrative defense-sector opportunity. Now, utilizing innovations emerging from Meta’s AR/VR research arm, Reality Labs, this partnership intends to create sophisticated mixed-reality wearables. The devices will incorporate Meta’s Llma artificial intelligence model and Anduril’s proven command-and-control software platform, Lattice. Ultimately, the intention is to provide soldiers a seamless, real-time projection of tactical and intelligence data in combat scenarios.
For Luckey, this announcement represents more than just a strategic business alliance. After selling Oculus to Facebook in 2014 for roughly $2 billion, Luckey was famously dismissed from Facebook in 2017 amid controversy regarding his political affiliations. He promptly rebounded later that year, founding Anduril alongside Brian Schimpf, Trae Stephens, and Matt Grimm.
A spokesperson at Anduril confirmed that the new family of military XR products developed with Meta is called “EagleEye,” a designation closely tied to Luckey’s original vision for Anduril. In the company’s first investor pitch deck, Luckey initially introduced a concept for XR headsets dubbed EagleEye. However, investors who were former Oculus colleagues persuaded him to prioritize Anduril’s software and command-and-control technologies first, advising against prematurely pursuing hardware development.
Reflecting on these developments earlier this year, Luckey remarked candidly online that early investors had correctly identified his motive at the time as overly driven by the desire to prove a point to the former colleagues who had ousted him from Facebook. With EagleEye’s arrival now officially confirmed, Luckey publicly expressed satisfaction at the completeness of this renewed collaboration, noting how all the accumulated experience and innovations—originating both before and during his time at Meta as well as afterward at Anduril—can finally converge in one pivotal project.
In a further sign of goodwill, Luckey also announced that Anduril had established its own corporate presence on Facebook—indicating he has fully moved past prior differences and is eager to leverage social media once more to promote his company’s groundbreaking technology.
