Anduril has seized the lead on the Army’s IVAS headset program, putting the eight-year-old company in charge of one of the military’s most important soldier-enhancement programs, and poising it to deliver not just new drones but also a key means of controlling them and the data they gather.
On Tuesday, the company announced that it would take over development and production of the Integrated Visual Augmentation System from Microsoft, whose stewardship of the $22 billion program was beset by delays, development problems, and cost overruns.
IVAS marks “the beginnings of a new path in human augmentation, one that will allow America’s warfighters to surpass the limitations of human form and cognition, seamlessly teaming enhanced humans with large packs of robotic and biologic teammates,” Anduril founder Palmer Luckey wrote in a Feb. 11 blog post, adding in a press release: “The IVAS program represents the future of mission command, combining technology and human capability to give soldiers the edge they need on the battlefield.”
The headset and similar future gear also represent a way to tie Anduril’s various systems together in one “ecosystem,” Luckey said later in the day on CNBC.
They “are going to be the portal through which the war fighter command controls all of these different autonomous weapons, autonomous sensors” in air, land, sea, space, cyberspace, and “eventually subterranean” domains, he said.
If the deal is approved by the Defense Department, Microsoft will become a preferred provider of cloud computing for IVAS and other Anduril AI efforts, the companies said.
Microsoft’s IVAS team will move over to Anduril, said one source familiar with the discussions, who added that the Pentagon has been largely supportive of the proposal.
The U.S. Army’s effort to bring cutting-edge augmented reality to ground troops has been a story of ambition meeting technical and human-factors challenges.
The idea was born from the ashes of U.S. Special Operations Command’s Iron Man program. Announced by then-SOCOM commander Adm. William McRaven in 2013, Iron Man sought to provide elite soldiers with bullet-proof exoskeletons and augmented visual intelligence. Energy and physics challenges made the exoskeleton portion impractical and largely unachievable. But the idea of augmented headsets that could go beyond night vision to provide augmented-reality functions such as face recognition remained a key area of Army interest.
When the IVAS program was launched in 2018, Microsoft won the contract with a plan to deliver a militarized version of its HoloLens 2. Early prototypes showed promise in controlled environments, but tests revealed discomfort and problems with peripheral vision. In 2021, software and hardware concerns delayed initial fielding.
In 2023, Microsoft began testing IVAS 1.2, which improved weight distribution, heat, and sensor fidelity. Early last year, soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, tested IVAS 1.2 prototypes at Picatinny Arsenal’s Tactical Behavioral Research Lab.
In September, Microsoft began working to integrate Anduril’s Lattice platform, which can fuse aerial threat data into warnings to operators.
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