In a twist that promises to make the inevitable Palmer Luckey documentary even more dramatic, Palmer Luckey’s military tech company Anduril has now officially partnered with Meta to build “the world’s best AR and VR systems for the US military.”

Luckey founded Oculus in 2012, the company whose Rift headset was the spark that rebooted the modern era of VR. As a rapidly growing startup, Oculus attracted the attention of Meta (at the time Facebook), which acquired the company in 2014 for more than $2 billion. Luckey continued in VR under Meta’s roof for several years but was eventually pushed out of the company due to backlash over his politics. After leaving Meta, Luckey went on to found Anduril, a tech-defense startup which itself went on to achieve a multi-billion valuation.

Unsurprisingly, given Luckey’s background, Anduril itself has been developing XR tech alongside more traditional military products like drones and sensors. In February, Anduril announced that it was taking over Microsoft’s beleaguered Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) program, which seeks to produce AR helmets for the United States Army.

An early version of the IVAS helmet | Image courtesy Microsoft

Now Anduril says it’s working in concert with Meta to build “the world’s best AR and VR systems for the US military.”

“Anduril and Meta are partnering to design, build, and field a range of integrated XR products that provide warfighters with enhanced perception and enable intuitive control of autonomous platforms on the battlefield,” the announcement reads. “The capabilities enabled by the partnership will draw on more than a decade of investment by both companies in advanced hardware, software, and artificial intelligence. The effort has been funded through private capital, without taxpayer support, and is designed to save the U.S. military billions of dollars by utilizing high-performance components and technology originally built for commercial use.”

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“I am glad to be working with Meta once again.” says Luckey. “Of all the areas where dual-use technology can make a difference for America, this is the one I am most excited about. My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers, and the products we are building with Meta do just that.”

Both Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth—who were publicly at odds with Luckey following his prior ousting from Meta—both provided quotes as part of the announcement, further cementing a renewed relationship between Meta and Luckey.

Oculus & Anduril founder Palmer Luckey (left) and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (right) pose for a new image demonstrating their renewed relationship | Image courtesy Palmer Luckey

Thus far it sounds like the work between the companies will largely be around the headset that’s being built for the IVAS project, a $20 billion program to build an AR helmet for ground soldiers. Initially headed by Microsoft, Anduril has purportedly taken a leading role over project, and has now tapped Meta to bring some of its technology to the battlefield.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Christian Schildwaechter

    TL;DR: IMHO there is barely any technical overlap between Anduril and Meta/MRL that would allow for any synergy gains from such a cooperation, but it may help Meta to face off current attempts to break up the company by making their XR research a matter of "national security", and aligning the company (even) more with the current US government.

    Color me skeptical. There isn't a lot those two could really benefit from each other. Meta is obviously trying to grow a huge audience to compete with Apple and Google in the future XR market, targeting mostly the low cost market with very affordable HMDs and smart glasses, paid for by Facebook and Instagram ads that generate 98% of Meta's revenue. Anduril is a defense industry-only company specializing on surveillance tech, esp. autonomous drones, and software that helps to analyze and visualize lots of data coming in from lots of different sources/devices, and like pretty much all military tech at the opposite end of the price scale, obscenely expensive.

    Anduril doesn't produce/sell any VR/XR HMDs at all. They used Oculus HMDs for visualization with their Lattice software during a 2020 demonstration for the US Air Force, but Lattice usually just runs on regular flat displays. Their primary contribution to IVAS seems to be software. The HMDs used will still be ruggedized derivates of Microsoft's Hololens, a see-through HMD that got a lot of flack during field tests both due to bad performance and being so bright that it made the wearer an easy target.

    There is almost no overlap in what Meta and Anduril currently offer, besides both doing some things in VR, and in the far future hoping to get to light and usable see-through "smart glasses" with very different use cases. So I'm somewhat inclined to assume that the purpose of this partnership is more about politics than technical cooperation.

    Of course Luckey will love that Meta now works with him again on XR after having been fired in 2017, and access to MRL with lots of XR prototypes might help Anduril in the future. Meta doesn't have a lot to gain technically, they don't even need military budgets to pay for research. But they are currently in a lot of trouble regarding monopolistic behavior, with the FTC urging the judge in the trial that ended yesterday to order Meta to break-up in his ruling expected later this year.

    Meta already split off the XR business from Facebook to "Meta Platforms, Inc." in preparation of a potential split, but they now have an urgent need to argue that breaking up the company would be very bad for everyone. It is quite hard to convince a judge or department of defense that separating Facebook/Instagram money from MRL burning through USD 10B+ each year could be harmful, when all they produce is consumer HMDs mostly used for video games plus some smart glasses.

    It might be easier to argue that these very expensive developments are important to national security and US dominance in the future field of war. Esp. when this is done in cooperation with a defense company that is very popular with the current administration, and got started with border surveillance systems, given that immigration gets an extreme amount of political attention by the ruling party. And who's founder got kicked out of Facebook for financially supporting a group that wanted to use online trolling as an "innovative way" to promote Donald Trump, while Facebook as a company was trying to keep the online trolling in check on their platform.

    So this cooperation could be seen as Meta making it indispensable in its current form, and another step towards a company policy more aligned with the current US government. Which can only help in their attempts to prevent getting broken up.
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/334d47481474c3c8b025ea65f60f09fa1f22da73d659148d235ab814dc986aa8.jpg

    • Wilson

      Where is your source for this one?
      "use online trolling as an "innovative way" to promote Donald Trump"

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        TL;DR: the trolling, "innovative way" and Trump support are well established; the trolling up to the point Luckey was fired had only happened offline, and Facebook later acknowledged that the firing was a too hasty form of damage control after a shitstorm with lots of questionable allegations had hit Luckey and Facebook.

        I'm fully aware of the controversy and that up to the point when Luckey made his donation, the only thing the newly founded pro-Trump non-profit Nimble America had set up was a single billboard. It showed a deformed image of Hillary Clinton saying "Too big for prison", a play on banks being bailed out for being too important to fail, and Clinton using a private mail server to still be able to communicate via her Blackberry with friends and colleges.

        Which no doubt was sloppy, and the FBI later determined that out of 30,000 mails sent, about 100 should have been marked as classified and therefore not be sent over a non-State Department server. Which back than was enough for Republicans to ask for her imprisonment, while today several members of cabinet very illegally communicating about live military operations on Signal, accidentally including journalists in the chat and intentionally also talking about the subjects with their spouse, brother and lawyer, is just a tiny mistake that will not get you into prison, not even fired as Secretary of Defense.

        So the known facts are:
        – Nimble America was a Trump supporting organization.
        – They used (and openly said so) political trolling to support Trump.
        – They planned to do more of that with setting up more billboards and sought more funding for it.
        – Luckey donated close to USD 10000 to their cause in late 2016.
        – Luckey later explained this donation with "I thought the organization had fresh ideas on how to communicate with young voters". -> "innovative ways"
        – Since 2017 Luckey has supported many Republican candidates, organizations and party chapters with a lot more money, and hosted fundraisers for Donald Trump, so there is a very clear affiliation.

        The rest gets more fuzzy, as a shitstorm broke loose with people accusing Palmer of a lot of things like being racist, based on sometimes rather ambiguous situations, and moved the so far offline-only trolling of Nimble America to claims of planned trolling in the online world, partly driven by previous comments from Luckey and alias accounts attributed to him:

        "We know Hillary Clinton is corrupt, a warmonger, a freedom-stripper. Not the good kind you see dancing in bikinis on Independence Day, the bad kind that strips freedom from citizens and grants it to donors."

        NimbleRichMan (Palmer Luckey) when introducing Nimble America on Reddit.

        This went very public, which was very bad for Facebook, as Luckey at that time was their poster boy for the new and exciting VR they were betting the company on, and they fired him. At that time I considered that an unfortunate overreaction, but at least somewhat understandable damage control measure for Facebook.

        I am in general very opposed to cancel culture and consider due process non-negotiable, so this rapid firing clearly irked me. But of course what Nimble America did/planed was equally unacceptable, and just extreme hypocrisy considering how blatantly the current administration ignores rules, laws, agreements, verdicts or security protocols.

        IMHO Luckey no doubt fucked up, something I partially attribute to him just being 23/24 years old at the time, and becoming extremely rich at 21 shortly after hacking together VR HMD prototypes at home and USC's Mixed Reality Lab. That didn't leave a lot of time to learn what not to do while in a very public managerial position. Facebook later acknowledged that they didn't check close enough what really happened and somewhat unfairly removed Luckey based more on the public outcry than on proof that Nimble America had in fact trolled on their platform. And we will never know if they actually would have if the whole situation hadn't blown up.

        So pretty much the only controversial part is whether Nimble America trolled online, the rest (intentional trolling as promotion tool, pro-Trump, Palmer's praise for them) is firmly established. Unfortunately a lot of people have tried to then spin it the other way, that Luckey was fired just for his political views instead of the reputational damage his actions caused Facebook. Which has been very clearly denied several times by Facebook/Zuckerberg, emphasizing that a lot of people inside Facebook are and were supporters of the Republicans and/or Trump. In their later apologies to Luckey they state that they should have been more thorough with their checks, because their firing of Luckey was largely based on it being unacceptable that a Facebook manager supported groups intentionally pushing online trolling, at a time when the online part hadn't actually happened (yet).

        • Sven Viking

          Pretty good summary. Just adding it was “too big to jail” (a play on “too big to fail”) rather than “for prison”, and the group’s stated purpose was to “bring [shitposting] to real life” with billboards, T-shirts, stickers and TV ads. There’s no reason to think “the online part hadn’t happened yet” since there was no indication that anything online was considered apart from fundraising.

  • This is totally unexpected

  • Orogogus

    The misplaced apostrophe in the article's title… bothers me? Makes me sad? Something a notch down from that, but it really ought to be fixed. To partner: I partner, you partner, we partner, he/she/it partners, they partner. Apostrophes are only rarely used for the plural form, and I think never for the third person singular present tense.

    • MosBen

      I'm glad that you posted this so that I didn't have to.

  • The King has returned! Kinda XD

  • Foreign Devil

    Anything can happen yes. .. We've definitely seen that… And most of it has been terrible.

  • Wilson

    Where is your source for this ?
    "use online trolling as an "innovative way" to promote Donald Trump"

    • Jistuce

      As I recall, that was the claims of the tabloid article that got him fired. Which was bad enough.
      Said claims were false, as it turned out. But the focus was already on Luckey, and then-Facebook encouraged people to bring their politics to work at the time. Turns out that tech workers in California are extremely liberal, and that resulted in office politics in general being extremely liberal.

      They now discourage people from talking politics on the clock.

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        That's extremely oversimplified. An article triggered the shitstorm that followed Luckey's donation, and a lot of the various following allegation were questionable. But the only thing that was really "false" what that the supported organization had already engaged in online trolling on Facebook, or plans to do so anytime soon. Up to that point they had set up only a single billboard with political "offline trolling", asking for more money to do more of these.

        Apologists later tried to turn this into Luckey being fired for his political views, which Facebook denied several times, pointing to lots of supporters of Trump and the Republican party among their employees at all times. The rest is very clearly established, including the public damage Facebook took from one of their managers public actions, resulting in his firing as damage control. They later apologized for reacting to the public outrage without firmly establishing that any actual abuse of their platform had happened.

        • Sven Viking

          “…the only thing that was really ‘false’ what that the supported organization had already engaged in online trolling on Facebook” is somewhat understating the pervasive and repeated claims of having funded “racist, sexist and white supremacist” memes online (now retracted without disclosure on most sites). The online/offline part isn’t necessarily the most significant false claim there.

          Outcry at the time also frequently overstated the level of funding by multiple orders of magnitude, e.g. “@PalmerLuckey gives millions to spread racism”.

        • Jistuce

          It is a complex situation, yes. The article did greatly exaggerate the donations Luckey had made.
          And, you know… maybe if Facebook hadn’t told him he had to endorse a democrat presidential candidate as a condition of keeping his employment, then demanded he rewrite it because he didn’t endorse Clinton and said some negative things about her, and then they fired him anyways, they’d have some credibility and I’d believe their claims that he wasn’t fired because of his politics.

          But it was abundantly clear that Luckey WAS fired for his politics, and Metabook simply believes saying “nuh-uh” often enough will make it true because their outsized influence on communication means they can control the narrative. And frankly, every aspect of that is appalling.
          I’m also horrified by the alternative explanation that someone’s employment is contingent upon activists not requesting their termination because of their politics, which is unarguably what happened with Mozilla and Brendan Eich(while I am glad I don’t have many examples to point to, I wish the two examples I do have weren’t both on the same side of the political spectrum).

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      See my detailed answer to your exact same question above. Ultrashort: the only part that wasn't factual at the time of firing was the "online", the political trolling method, Luckey's praise for it and his and Nimble America's support were well established.

  • kool

    I hate that the face of the end of the world has a mullet

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      The face actually has a goatee, the mullet is on the other side, hovering above what I suppose are still flipflops. And I seriously doubt that Palmer Luckey will or could cause the end of the world. Mostly because their no doubt clever software for data pooling will very likely be as overpromising as pretty much every other software that promised to revolutionize the world before. In the end those at best become another tool, or occasionally getting abandoned for not really being all that practical in daily use.

      There is a huge difference between having a plan, and successfully executing said plan. Even Musk, who no doubt was in a much better position to destroy the world, just abandoned his recent destructive quest, after the newly proposed budget plan massively increases the deficit instead of reducing it, which was the whole legitimation for having a blind guy run a combine harvester through public programs and employees.

      To really destroy the world, you actually have to be rather clever and systematic with a long term perspective, because the world doesn't want to be destroyed, and consequently will fight back. But of course a group of incompetent morons throwing hand grenades in all directions, because they believe that is how rockets work, can still cause a lot of damage.

      • kool

        It’s not him I’m worried about it’s the tech these dudes will push into the wild that’s smarter than them.

  • Ad

    Utterly repulsive in every way.

  • Ondrej

    From a podcast with Palmer we know that one of the helmets uses multiple microdisplays glued together with visible seams – artifacts like these are considered not acceptable for consumer market, but okay for the military where utility has higher priority.

  • Jistuce

    Honestly, I’m concerned about the entire country at this point. it seems like everyone wants everything to be about politics, arguing about politics seems to have replaced baseball, football, and basketball as America’s favorite sport, and everyone is getting more extreme in their political views.