Microsoft’s six -year program to make Hololens helmets for the US military could get additional help. If the Ministry of Defense approves the agreement, the company develop Its existing partnership With Andundil Industries, Palmer Luckey’s Defense Startup, for the following steps in the IVAS program (IVAS).
Microsoft, who directed the program, would switch to the provision of an AI and Cloud infrastructure. Meanwhile, Andundil would do almost everything else, including “production monitoring, future development of hardware and software and delivery times”.
Andundil makes a wide range of defense technologies, including drone interceptors, sentry towers, fogs, drones and even an autonomous submarine. But taking into account the history of Luckey as the main inventor of the Oculus Rift – and, by extension, the Modern Consumer Industry XR – the IVAS program could perhaps be the most natural adjustment of the Technological Startup defense.
Microsoft started working with the army in 2019, using a modified HoloLens 2 for a helmet that would have been “a real game of the life of Call of duty. “The first prototypes allowed soldiers to see a virtual card showing the locations of their team, a compass and the reticle of their weapon. Thermal imagery served as an alternative to traditional night vision helmets.
But the program encountered slowders, one of whom was too familiar to many of those who tried badly designed VR games: that made them want to launch. In addition to nausea, helmets have also led to eye and headache. Their field of loose and limited vision and – perhaps the worst of all – a glow emitted (which could make them easy to hear) did not help either.
The problems contributed to the Congress denying the army’s request to buy 6,900 pairs as part of a government financing bill in 2023. Instead, he allocated $ 40 million to Microsoft for develop a new version, that the army accepted Later that year. However, the helmet has not yet reached the battlefield.
Bloomberg reported On Tuesday, the first comments of the last IVAS prototypes are encouraging, but the army wants the cost to be “significantly less than” of $ 80,000 currently planned. The army could possibly command up to 121,000 aircraft, but the new version should still pass a combat test at Haut Stress this year before moving on to full production.
In December, Andundil joined forces with Openai to develop AI for the Pentagon. This agreement will have the manufacturer of Chatppt providing its GPT-4O and Openai O1 models to the defense systems of Andundil’s drones for the army.
This article originally appeared on engadget to
