Palmer Luckey says his military AR project is a big leap over what exists today
Palmer Luckey is developing an AR helmet for the US military. He promises a major technological leap over existing devices.
Last week, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey announced that his defense company Anduril would take over Microsoft's multi-billion dollar IVAS program, which aims to develop an AR-based integrated visual augmentation system for the U.S. military.
In an interview with Shawn Ryan, Luckey revealed the name and first details of the project. It seems that "EagleEye" is not an evolution of Microsoft's IVAS AR helmet (see article image), but a proprietary design that Anduril has been developing in secret for years.
Luckey remains vague in his description of the system, but makes bold promises, as reported by UploadVR.
"It is going to be by far the best AR/VR/MR vision augmentation system that has ever been built, in terms of resolution, in terms of field of view, in terms of graphical fidelity, in terms of sensor quality, and what you can do with those sensors. It is a bigger jump from what exists today than the jump that I made when I started Oculus. It is a jump that, I think, cannot be overstated."
Luckey describes EagleEye as a system "that integrates hearing protection, hearing augmentation, vision protection, vision augmentation, all into one seamless ballistic shell that protects you from airbursts, direct fire rounds, blast and concussion."
In the nearly 4 hour interview, Luckey talks in more detail about the potential capabilities of the system, which you can about in UploadVR's article.
Even if Luckey ultimately delivers only a tenth of what he promises, I will be following this project with great interest. That's for two reasons.
Firstly, because Anduril is not developing a headset for normal consumers and therefore has more technical possibilities. Second, because EyeEagle seems to be more about augmenting the human senses and less about displaying elaborate 3D graphics, which is an intriguing focus.
Historically, many technologies were first developed in the military sector before finding their way to the general public. This has been the case with virtual and augmented reality. Under Luckey's leadership, the technology may get another unexpected boost.
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