{"id":214073,"date":"2025-10-15T01:37:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T01:37:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/214073\/"},"modified":"2025-10-15T01:37:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T01:37:09","slug":"palmer-luckey-and-mark-zuckerberg-are-putting-cat-ears-on-the-us-military","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/214073\/","title":{"rendered":"Palmer Luckey and Mark Zuckerberg Are Putting Cat Ears on the US Military"},"content":{"rendered":"

Palmer Luckey and Mark Zuckerberg never quite cracked virtual reality headsets for consumers, but they\u2019re taking another crack at it with the US military as their new audience. On Monday, Luckey\u2019s military tech company Anduril announced<\/a> its AI-powered mixed reality system EagleEye, which will put hardware right into the helmets of Army soldiers and provide them with a heads-up display to view information in real-time.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t want to give service members a new tool\u2014we\u2019re giving them a new teammate,\u201d Palmer Luckey, Anduril\u2019s founder, said in a statement<\/a>. \u201cThe idea of an AI partner embedded in your display has been imagined for decades. EagleEye is the first time it\u2019s real.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Anduril, EagleEye is a modular system that includes configurations for helmets, visors, and glasses. The company also claims its system will balance weight by reducing the \u201cbulk of traditional night vision goggles\u201d while introducing sensors \u201caligned with a warfighter\u2019s center of gravity.\u201d<\/p>\n

The helmet module, notably, gives soldiers tactical cat ears. Frankly, we live in a time where it\u2019s entirely impossible to know if that is the most efficient design for the effort or if it\u2019s just another CEO with the sense of humor of a 13-year-old<\/a> doing a multi-million dollar meme, a la Elon Musk running a government project named after a memecoin or making Tesla models spell out the word \u201cSEXY.\u201d Luckey used the announcement that his company was taking over a multi-billion-dollar mixed-reality goggles contract<\/a> with the Army earlier this year to re-create his famous and meme-ified TIME Magazine cover<\/a>, so it\u2019s not like he\u2019s above that kind of thing.<\/p>\n

The heads-up display is perhaps the most marketable part of Anduril\u2019s project, which was made in part with the help of Mark Zuckerberg and Meta, and the company showed it off with a preview video<\/a> that looks like it was ripped right out of\u00a0Call of Duty. The display will reportedly give soldiers access to information like mission briefings, map overlays, and real-time insights like identifying the positioning of other actors in the field.<\/p>\n

EagleEye is something of a culmination of Anduril\u2019s work on the Army\u2019s Soldier Borne Mission Command (SBMC) and Soldier Borne Mission Command\u2013Architecture (SBMC-A) programs, which is a rebrand of the Integrated Visual Augmentation System the company took over from Microsoft. Last month, the Army announced that Luckey\u2019s Anduril and Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s Meta received contracts from the Army<\/a> to produce prototype mixed-reality combat goggles. We\u2019ll see if they have any other plans to UwU-fiy the military.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Palmer Luckey and Mark Zuckerberg never quite cracked virtual reality headsets for consumers, but they\u2019re taking another crack…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":214074,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,32162,254,255,64,63,4943,2455,1333,34373,89754,105,238],"class_list":["post-214073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-anduril","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-emerging-technologies","tag-mark-zuckerberg","tag-meta","tag-mixed-reality","tag-palmer-luckey","tag-technology","tag-virtual-reality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/214074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}