turning smart glasses into instruments of war

Anduril and Meta join forces. What began as a race to conquer the “metaverse” with devices like the Quest has transformed into something very different. Specifically, in a contract of 159 million dollars that Anduril and Meta have jointly signed to develop smart glasses that enhance the operational capacity of soldiers on the battlefield. This joint project is being developed in parallel with the Anduril helmet with assisted vision system, called EagleEye.

War made video game. These augmented reality glasses provide the soldier with an integrated system that theoretically displays a map, identifies enemy vehicle profiles, calculates shooting distance, processes threats in real time and overlays tactical data on the wearer’s physical environment. The future vision of these companies is to add special functions, such as being able to order a drone attack thanks to eye tracking and voice commands. War made video game.

From consumers to soldiers. It is ironic that a technology that was originally used for entertainment applications ends up having a military purpose. Anduril provides its software platform, called Lattice, which acts as the “brain” of the system, fusing the data captured by the glasses with that received from the rest of the battlefield network.

The ethical challenge. If an AI decides what a target is and displays it prominently on the soldier’s glasses, is the room for human error reduced or are we simply automating violence? This gamification of war is increasing and the danger is evident: treating a combat environment almost as if it were a video game can make it difficult to distinguish between civilians and combatants, for example.

If the metaverse doesn’t work… Meta has an opportunity here to recover part of the gigantic investment it has made in the field of virtual and augmented reality. After losing tens of billions of dollars with the metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg has decided leave these solutions in the background in the end-user market. And he has also seen clearly that his advances could have a very juicy military application.

The geopolitical factor. There is no doubt that both in Silicon Valley and in the rest of the world there is one huge demand of new technological solutions applied to the battlefield. The conflicts that have occurred in recent years have caused skyrocket defense budgetsand here both Anduril and Meta wanted to take advantage of their opportunity.

Microsoft missed its chance. In Redmond they had a fantastic product with Hololensbut its role in the end-user segment was never clear, and the company refocused it on first- and then to the military sector. Here the failure was enormous despite the investment of 22 billion dollars that the US Army carried out in this area. Meta and Anduril have wanted to take the baton, but they will not be alone: ​​companies like Rivet either Elbit They have projects that compete to become the new “weapons” of the soldier of the future.

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