Anduril founder Palmer Luckey has a plan for “turning soldiers into superheroes” that starts with taking over a mixed-reality headset project for the U.S. Army, the Integrated Visual Augmentation System program.
Anduril and Microsoft announced this week that Mr. Luckey’s team would now oversee the Pentagon program pending the Department of Defense’s approval. The multibillion-dollar IVAS program is meant to give soldiers new wearable systems combining augmented and virtual reality tools to increase combat effectiveness, survivability against drones and accelerate command of unmanned systems, according to Microsoft.
Mr. Luckey said his vision for the program will transform the capacity of the nation’s armed forces.
“The IVAS program — one of the most important programs to the Army — represents just 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,” Mr. Luckey wrote on his blog.
Mr. Luckey’s rise to becoming an eccentric billionaire winning Pentagon contracts over established players such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman started with a focus on wearable technology.
The 32-year-old founded Oculus VR in 2012 and sold it to Facebook two years later for $2 billion, according to reports. He was ousted from Facebook in 2016 and he told CNBC his donations to a pro-Trump group contributed to his firing.
His support for President Trump looks to be paying dividends now, but Mr. Luckey wrote Tuesday that his interest in helping the U.S. military with the mixed-reality headset project predates his work building either Oculus or Anduril.
“Since my pre-Oculus days as a teenager…I’ve believed there would be a headset on every soldier long before there is a headset on every civilian,” Mr. Luckey said. “Given that America loses more troops in training than combat, the Squad Immersive Virtual Trainer (SiVT) side of IVAS alone has the potential to save more lives than practically anything else we can imagine building.”
Anduril is building many things. Last month, the company announced it was developing a massive weapons factory in Columbus, Ohio. The company said the new Arsenal-1 facility in Ohio would bring 4,000 jobs, $1 billion invested by Anduril, and produce the first hyperscale manufacturing site.
The full scale of Mr. Luckey’s weapons manufacturing plans are unknown. Last year, Mr. Luckey identified the next warfighting domain as subterranean, following air, space, land, sea, and cyber.
“People think that I mean … tunnels and caves.That isn’t what I mean,” Mr. Luckey said on the Pirate Wires podcast. “I mean using the entire volume of the Earth as a three-dimensional space that you can maneuver in and fight wars in.”
Mr. Luckey said in the 2024 podcast that the idea may sound crazy, but the U.S. and Soviet Union were pursuing nuclear-powered vehicles moving below the surface of the Earth similar to submarines in water.
On Tuesday, Mr. Luckey said he did not have time for business as usual.
“Whatever you are imagining, however crazy you imagine I am, multiply it by ten and then do it again,” Mr. Luckey said on X about the IVAS project. “I am back, and I am only getting started.”
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.