Zuckerberg and Palmer Luckey back together: Meta and Anduril are jointly developing augmented reality devices for the US Army

Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus and current head of defence startup Anduril, has unexpectedly returned to the same team as Meta, from which he was scandalously fired in 2017 for publicly supporting far-right movements.

He is now part of the ambitious EagleEye military project with Mark Zuckerberg's company, which aims to provide US soldiers with augmented and virtual reality devices to help in real-life combat situations.

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Together with Meta, Lucky is vying for a $100 million Pentagon contract to develop and produce the army's next-generation AR/VR headsets. It's part of a massive $22bn initiative to bring wearable digital systems to the US Army. The new devices won't just be "eyes" on the battlefield - they are planned to be equipped with AI, sensors and the ability to integrate with other military systems.

It is noteworthy that Anduril is replacing Microsoft in this project, as the military had serious complaints about its HoloLens project.

In turn, Meta is showing great interest in participating in government defence programmes, trying to draw the attention of government customers to its developments and ideas.

Source: The Wall Street Journal