Palmer Luckey partners with Microsoft to turn US soldiers into Starship Troopers

Anduril Industries, the military tech company started by Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey, is teaming up with Microsoft to improve the mixed-reality headsets used by the United States Army. The project announced by Anduril will embed the company’s Lattice software into the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), allowing the HoloLens-based goggles to update soldiers with live information pulled from drones, ground vehicles, and aerial defense systems.

The partnership marks a return to the VR headset space for Luckey, having sold Oculus to Meta for $2 billion in 2014. Luckey started Anduril in 2017 with support from venture capitalist Peter Thiel. 

The Lattice integration with IVAS could alert wearers to incoming threats picked up by an air defense system, for example, even when outside of visual range. “The idea is to enhance soldiers,” Luckey said in an interview with Wired, “Their visual perception, audible perception — basically to give them all the vision that Superman has, and then some, and make them more lethal.” 

Luckey likened the IVAS project to the infantry headsets that featured in Robert Heinlein’s 1950s Starship Troopers novel, telling Wired that the headset is “already coming together exactly the way that the sci-fi authors thought that it would.”

The initial IVAS headset developed by Microsoft in 2021 combined integrated thermal and night-vision imaging sensors into a heads-up display, but reportedly caused headaches, nausea, and eyestrain during testing. Microsoft improved the design to correct these issues last year, and told Wired that the IVAS platform will be “refined further” following additional tests taking place in early 2025. The US Army previously said it plans to spend up to $21.9 billion over the 10-year IVAS project contract.