“You see the enemy before he sees you”

Anduril Industries, the military technology company founded by the creator of the Oculus RiftPalmer Luckey, has announced a hardware solution that your company has developed in collaboration with Meta. This is EagleEye, a modular system consisting of a military helmet equipped with mixed reality glasses. The US military is already preparing to test it.

The Lord of Mixed Reality. At just 20 years old, Palmer Luckey managed to dust off virtual reality technology and turn it into a mass product with the Oculus Rift. After selling his company to Facebook for $2.4 billion in 2014, he was fired two years later and changed course to found Anduril Industries. End users no longer mattered there, because the total focus was on technology with defense applications and military. Your virtual border wall or their combat drones are two good examples, but this new modular system called EagleEye returns it to its origins and to the world of augmented and mixed reality.

The US Army has been looking for something like this for years.. A decade ago the US Army began working on its Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) with the aim of assisting its troops. In 2018 the army reached an agreement with Microsoftwho began to try integrate your Hololens with that orientation, but the project ended up being a failure. It was inconvenient for the soldiers, who could not or would not use it as intended.

Anduril takes the baton from IVAS. In April 2025 the army managed to transfer his contract from Microsoft to Anduril, and Luckey and his team got to work on a much more versatile and modular solution. What he proposes is a family of solutions that adapt to each type of scenario: a soldier on a ground mission may need night vision and thermal sensors, but a helicopter pilot will need other things, and a mechanic repairing a tank may only need glasses. of the Meta Ray-Ban Display type that allow teleassistance for these repairs. The EagleEye family of devices precisely allows different formats to be adopted for different use cases: it is modular, or at least that is the intention.

You see before they see you. In a spectacular video shared on the official Anduril Industries account on X, the company shows a video of how the glasses would work on a ground mission. As can be seen in the video, the soldier who wears them can choose different types of vision—night, thermal—and has additional information that allows him not only to monitor the position of his companions, but also to detect and even predict the position of enemies. As they indicated in the text of that publication, the idea is “See (the enemy) before being seen.”

Shooting at the target with the help of a machine. In one interview at DefenseScoop Luckey explained how all these ideas were already made up and now he’s just trying to put them into practice. One of EagleEye’s options is to offer shooting assistance, and there he explained that in reality all of these ideas had already been invented and he was just putting them into practice:

“Has everyone read Starship Troopers? Robert Heinlein literally came up with all of this in the 1940s. They’re not new ideas. He said, ‘Hey, you have a ballistic computer in your mobile infantry rifle, and it tells you where the bullets are going to go based on their motion, relative motion, target, wind, and the Coriolis effect.’ Well, we’re doing all that.”

Dizziness, nothing. At that same conference Luckey, who admitted to being arrogant, stated that he was “the world’s best designer of vision solutions, and I’m passionate about it.” According to him, the traditional dizziness problems that virtual reality causes are already solved in their hardware because “I already fought with those problems and solved them.”

The army will test them soon. The EagleEye systems will begin to be evaluated by about 100 United States Army personnel in the second quarter of 2026. Luckey assured that they are already manufacturing most of the components that will be integrated into that hardware. According to Luckey, the goal of EagleEye is “to keep the soldier alive and make him more lethal.”

Cost: about $25,000. The Army expected to pay between $50,000 and $80,000 for each system when the IVAS program was started. Luckey highlighted that Anduril expects the price of its EagleEye to end up being “half of that,” but in addition, the mass military adoption of these mixed reality helmets and glasses will reduce the cost per unit to a few thousand dollars. “I firmly believe that you’re going to see AR in every soldier’s head before you see it in every end user’s head.”

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