As of today, Anduril Industries is taking the reins of the largest project of its kind in history: the United States Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) program.
For me, this announcement is deeply personal. Since my pre-Oculus days as a teenager who had the opportunity to do a tiny bit of work on the Army’s BRAVEMIND project, I’ve believed there would be a headset on every soldier long before there is a headset on every civilian. 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.
Tactical heads-up-displays that turn warfighters into technomancers and pair us with weaponized robotics were one of the products in the original Anduril pitch deck for a reason. The past eight years we have spent building Lattice have put Anduril in a position to make this type of thing actually useful in the way military strategists and technologists have long dreamed of, ever since Robert Heinlein’s 1959 novel Starship Troopers. Not just day and night and thermal and ultraviolet, but peering into an idealized interactive real-time composite of past, present, and future that will quickly surpass traditional senses like vision and touch. Put another way, Superman doesn’t use menus – he just sees and does. If Anduril had been more than a dozen people when IVAS was first getting spun up all those years ago (at least the Tragic Heap guys didn’t win, our country really dodged a bullet there), I do believe our crazy pitch could have won this from the start – as things stand, though, there is no time like the present.
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.
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____________________________________________________________________________________________speculative augmentation efforts I have been leading in the shadows over the past few years via our longstanding but never-disclosed Warfighter Systems business line.
I have to admit that I am almost equally chuffed to finally get a Microsoft Partner campus badge – I’ve always been a Microsoft fanboy after all, to the point of hosting a midnight launch party for the launch of Windows 7. Yes, all of us had already been running the Release Candidate for years at that point, but there is something special about going gold, you know? Microsoft has some pretty extraordinary things in the pipe on the AI and cloud computing side that will continue to power IVAS, and as the one person in the universe who bought a Surface Duo phone and then a Surface Duo 2, I am looking forward to letting them do what they do best so I can do what I do best. I am, after all, the best head-mounted-display designer in the world.
This move has been so many years in the making, over a decade of hacking and scheming and dreaming and building with exactly this specific outcome clearly visualized in my mind’s eye. I can hardly believe I managed to pull it off. Everything I’ve done in my career — building Oculus out of a camper trailer, shipping VR to millions of consumers, getting run out of Silicon Valley by backstabbing snakes, betting that Anduril could tear people out of the bigtech megacorp matrix and put them to work on our nation’s most important problems — has led to this moment. IVAS isn’t just another product, it is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to redefine how technology supports those who serve. We have a shot to prove that this long-standing dream is no windmill, that this can expand far beyond one company or one headset and act as a a nexus for the best of the best to set a new standard for how a large collection of companies can work together to solve our nation’s most important problems.
Whatever you are imagining, however crazy you imagine I am, multiply it by ten and then do it again. I am back, and I am only getting started.