Earlier this year, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Palmer Luckey, formerly of Oculus, settled their differences for the sake of making more money. The first fruits from this, EagleEye, have now been properly revealed by Luckey’s Anduril Industries. As expected, it’s a headset for the US military. Yes, Meta is involved.
If those last four words weren’t enough to terrify you, you could be a potential customer for this “modular, AI-powered family of systems that unifies command and control, digital vision, and survivability within a single, adaptive architecture.”
EagleEye cherry
EagleEye is actually a pretty cool bit of tech, if you’ve got a thing for video games and/or military hardware. Some functions are close to the CrossCam feature seen in Ghost Recon Future Soldier, with customised heads-up displays for day and night operations showing “the precise location of teammates in world space, such as their exact position within a building or on a specific floor, rather than simply appearing as a dot on a 2D map.”
The same sensors and other visual feeds allow for tracking of threats “even when terrain or structures block direct line of sight.” Couple that with ballistic protection, sensors on the sides and rear of the helmet for enhanced situation awareness, spatial audio, and radio frequency detection built into EagleEye, and you’ve got a serious piece of battlefield gear.
It gets, somehow, even cooler. Soldiers will also have the ability to “task unmanned aerial vehicles (UAS), call for fires, and control robotic teammates” while on the move, with lattice mesh networking (similar to what powers Jack Dorsey’s internet-free Bitchat) providing connectivity in places with crappy infrastructure.
There’s even a practice mode, of sorts, that recalls the mission previews you’d find in most military video game load screens and cutscenes. EagleEye wearers “can rehearse missions, coordinate movements, and integrate live video feeds pinned to terrain” via the helmet’s interface. Technically, even an in-person inset video call from the commanding general (a common gaming trope) will be possible, though that’s not a listed feature.
Since Meta’s involved, we’re almost waiting for an announcement about Instagram support or the introduction of in-HUD ads. The company probably won’t do that to American soldiers, though. Probably.
