Palmer Lucky, the "father" of Oculus Rift, is developing a virtual battlefield system for the Pentagon

Startup Anduril Industries inventor Palmer Lucky has signed a Pentagon contract under the controversial Project Maven program. The latter should become an advanced analytical system that will view and process videos shot by drones. Maven algorithms must effectively learn to distinguish people in the scanned personnel and promptly supply military officers with high-quality information about the situation in the war zone.

The Maven program has sparked widespread discontent in Silicon Valley. Last year, Google began to participate in the Pentagon project, but angry employees of the Internet giant demanded to stop cooperation with the military. As a result, Google management decided not to renew the contract after its expiration in 2019. For the company, this turned out to be a loss: according to correspondence received by The Intercept reporters, the business development unit expected profit growth from military contracts from 15 to 250 million dollars a year.



A similar situation with the Pentagon met with resistance from Microsoft employees. They demanded that their company abandon the 480 millionth contract under which the U.S. Army would receive 100,000 HoloLens mixed reality headsets. Due to the current political situation in the United States, public opinion is rather disapproving of the development of military technology.

Palmer Lucky founded Anduril Industries in 2017. If the name seems familiar to you, it is because it is taken from The Lord of the Rings: the so-called forged sword of Aragorn, one of the main characters of the novel. Together with Lucky, the startup co-founded several former executives of the Palantir Technologies startup, which provides analytical software for hedge funds, intelligence agencies and investment banks. This is another Tolkien project, named after the magic ball of Palantir.


Tower Lattice, photo Wired

Anduril Industries' main goal is to create military technology, but so far the company is known only for the Lattice project. This is an “electronic” digital wall for guarding the country's borders, an alternative to the “Trump Great Wall”. Lattice consists of towers with video cameras, lidar, infrared sensors and drones. The software for the "wall" automatically distinguishes between people and coyotes, sees flying drones. Data from the tower can be transmitted on a virtual reality headset, and it will highlight objects, as in a computer game.

Three Lattice test towers were installed in the summer of 2018 at a private ranch in south Texas. In ten weeks of their work, they helped border guards catch 55 violators and seize 445 kilograms of marijuana. During the test, Samsung Gear VR virtual reality glasses were used. Lattice is priced at $ 500,000 per mile. For comparison, the concrete border wall that the American president promised to erect on the Mexican border will cost $ 24 million per mile.


View from glasses connected to Lattice, photo by Wired

Anduril Industries began working with the military back in 2018. The developments of the Lattice project were actively adapted for Maven. As a result, the first phase has already been completed; according to unconfirmed Pentagon data, its result was a virtual terrain survey system for the military. It allows soldiers to see the battlefield remotely and more accurately orient the impact of drones.

Lucky hinted at Anduril's participation in Project Maven during the Web Summit conferencein Lisbon last November. “We are working on receiving data from many different sensors and combining them on a platform with artificial intelligence, which can build a perfect three-dimensional model of everything that happens on a large area,” said Lucky. “Then we analyze this data, mark everything with tags, find important places and transfer it to people on the battlefield on mobile devices.”

“In the future, I think, soldiers will become superheroes with the ability of omniscience: they will know where each enemy, each ally and all resources are,” he continued. According to the entrepreneur, soldiers will remotely control vehicles and guns using helmets of virtual and augmented reality.


Tower Lattice and her mobile application, photo Wired

In the same speech, Lucky expressed confidence that the military would be the first to start wearing augmented reality headsets, not consumers. VR and AR devices compete with smartphones and should become much better than smartphones before becoming a mass device.

Recall that Lucky became famous as a promoter of virtual reality helmets and the inventor of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. Her crowdfunding campaign first “blew up” Kickstarter, and then Facebook redeemed a promising startup. At that time, Palmer was only 22 years old.


Anduril startup team

Unfortunately, luck left him on this. In 2016, a scandal erupted over the fact that Lucky supported Donald Trump in the US election, and not Hillary Clinton. In 2017, Zenimax sued Oculus VR, accusing the latter of stealing intellectual property to develop a virtual reality helmet. Support for Trump Lucky was not forgiven by the media and the public, and the situation with Zenimax led to the dismissal from Facebook. However, even before the series of public fiascoes, Lucky met with Trey Stevens, a former employee of Palantir, and began to think about military technology.

Technologies created by Anduril for the Maven program will be deployed in real-life conditions in Afghanistan. When exactly this will happen is still unknown.