Palmer Luckey and Mark Zuckerberg put cat ears on the US military

Palmer Luckey and Mark Zuckerberg never got around to creating virtual reality headsets for consumers, but they’re having another go at it with the US military as their new audience. On Monday, military technology company Loki Anduril Announce EagleEye’s AI-powered mixed reality system, which will place devices directly into Army soldiers’ helmets and provide them with a heads-up display to display information in real time.

“We don’t want to give service members a new tool, we want to give them a new teammate,” Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril, said in a statement. statement. “The idea of ​​having an AI partner embedded in your screen has been conceived for decades. EagleEye was the first time this idea became real.”

According to Anduril, EagleEye is a modular system that includes helmet, visor and goggle configurations. The company also claims that its system will balance weight by reducing “the bulk of traditional night vision goggles” while introducing sensors that are “aligned with the fighter’s center of gravity.”

The helmet module, in particular, gives soldiers tactical cat ears. Frankly, we live in a time where it’s downright impossible to know if this is the most effort-efficient design or just something else A CEO with the sense of humor of a 13 year old Making a multi-million dollar meme, or running an Elon Musk-style government project called the memcoin, or making models for Tesla spelling out the word “SEXY.” Loki used it to announce his company’s existence Acquisition of multi-billion dollar mixed reality glasses contract With the Army earlier this year for Recreate the famous and ridiculous TIME magazine coverso it’s not like it’s above that kind of thing.

Perhaps the most marketable part of the Anduril project is the single-screen display, which was made in part with the help of Mark Zuckerberg and Meta, and the company demonstrated it through a demonstration Video preview It looks like it was taken directly Call of duty. The display will reportedly give soldiers access to information such as mission summaries, map overlays and real-time insights such as pinpointing the locations of other actors in the field.

EagleEye is the culmination of Anduril’s work on the Army’s Soldier Borne Mission Command (SBMC) and Soldier Borne Mission Command-Architecture (SBMC-A) programs, which is a rebrand of the integrated visual augmentation system the company acquired from Microsoft. Last month, the military declared Luke Anduril and Mark Zuckerberg dead He received contracts from the army To produce a prototype of mixed reality combat glasses. We’ll see if they have any other plans to defeat the army.