Palmer Luckey’s military tech company Anduril recently announced a partnership with Meta to build “the world’s best AR and VR systems for the US military.” In two recent public conversations, Luckey offered up some details on the XR helmet his company is building for the military and how this unlikely partnership arose years after his VR company Oculus was acquired by Meta, followed by his unceremonious firing.
Following the announcement, Luckey spoke to host Ashlee Vance on an episode of the Core Memory podcast, and on stage with author and creative technologist Stephanie Riggs during a conversation at the AWE USA 2025 conference. From these conversations, we’ve detailed the most interesting information about Anduril’s upcoming military XR headset.
Eagle Eye
Luckey said that Anduril’s upcoming military XR device is codenamed ‘Eagle Eye’. The goal is to build a complete helmet replacement (with built-in XR capabilities) for soldiers, rather than merely an add-on device that would be worn or attached to standard-issue helmets.
“Eagle Eye is not just a head mounted display. It’s a fully-integrated ballistic shell, with hearing protection, vision protection, head protection, on-board compute, on-board networking, radios… and also vision augmentation systems… sensor systems that enhance your perception,” Luckey said on Core Memory. “And what we’re doing is working with Meta to take the building blocks that they’ve invested enormous amounts of money and expertise in, and we’re able to use those building blocks in Eagle Eye without having to recreate them from scratch ourselves.”
More specifically, he explained at AWE that, “Eagle Eye is not one head mounted display. It’s actually a platform for building vision augmentation systems. We’re building different versions because you have different people who have different roles. The guy who is a front-line infantryman being shot at has a different job than the guy who’s a logistician, or aircraft maintainer, or somebody who works in a warehouse. The field-of-view they need, the level of ballistic rating they need—it’s very very different. So Eagle Eye is actually a platform for hosting multiple vision augmentation systems.”
While not many technical specifics have been shared thus far, Luckey mentioned the headset uses multiple microdisplays per-eye. That tells us the headset could be a passthrough AR headset rather than transparent. That might seem surprising, (considering the need for battlefield awareness) but he repeatedly emphasises the goal of the helmet offering greater perception for soldiers through augmentation, rather than less.
Luckey admitted that the multi-microdisplay layout results in a visible seam in the peripheral image (which reminds me of an old ultrawide field-of-view headset prototype from Panasonic).
He said the seam wouldn’t be acceptable for the consumer market, but because the headset is being built as a tool to keep people alive, the tradeoff is worth it.
“One of the things we’re doing with eagle eye is using multiple microdisplays per-eye, with a tiled seam. And so you end up with this small little kind of distorted seam that’s living out in your peripheral view. And you can see it really easily. It’s there. It doesn’t bother you. It doesn’t make you sick. But it’s definitely there,” he told host Ashlee Vance. “Apple [for example] can’t make something like that [because it wouldn’t be acceptable to the consumer market]. They can’t make a thing where there’s a seamless magical experience, except for this weird distorted bubble seam down both sides of your vision in your periphery. But for a tool [like Eagle Eye] you can do that… it’s not actually a problem.”
As for cost, at AWE Luckey suggested that the headset could cost in excess of $10,000.
“[The US military] would rather have something that is significantly more performant even if it’s somewhat more expensive. Now I’m not saying we should charge the government some obscene price, but if they can choose between a $1,000 sensor that lets them see things that are twice as far, or a $100 sensor that has half the range, every time they’re going to make the choice for the $1,000 sensor, because the cost of losing that soldier or failing the mission is so much higher than the cost of that headset,” he said. “So what’s fun for me—from a tech perspective—is we’re able to build a headset that costs tens of thousands of dollars to make. We can load it with image sensors that are nicer than even Apple would put in something like the Vision Pro. We can afford to put extremely high-end displays in it that are far beyond what the consumer market would reasonably bear today.”
Without a consumer cost restriction, Luckey said Eagle Eye will have some specs that are significantly beyond anything that’s available on the consumer market today.
“Eagle Eye is gonna be the best AR and VR device that’s ever been made; it’s not even close. We’re running at an extraordinarily high framerate and extraordinarily high resolution. I’d tell you the specs but unfortunately the customer doesn’t want me to at this point,” Luckey told Stephanie Riggs at AWE. “But I will tell you it’s several times higher resolution in capability than even Apple Vision Pro. There’s nothing in the consumer market that’s going to be able to meet it where it is, because I have a different set of requirements. I’m not making an entertainment device you buy at Best Buy, I’m building a tool that keeps you alive. And that’s something the Army is willing to pay for.”
He also emphasized not just the helmet’s XR tech but also the integration of artificial intelligence, likening the end goal being “in the vein of Cortana,” the artificially intelligent sidekick of Master Chief (the hero from the Halo franchise).
“[…talking about Iron Man’s sci-fi armor suit] it wasn’t just the suit right? It was also the augmented vision paired with [some] kind of AI guardian angel in the form of Jarvis; that is what we were building. Eagle Eye has an onboard AI guardian angel, maybe less in the style of Jarvis and more in the vein of Cortana from Halo, but this idea of having this ever-present companion who can operate systems, who can communicate with others, that you can offload tasks onto, that is looking out for you with more eyes than you could ever look out for yourself, right there in your helmet—that is such a powerful thing to make real.”
One of the key capabilities of the headset involves threat detection, Luckey said at AWE.
“Eagle Eye has a 360° threat awareness system… that is able to detect drone threats, vehicular threats, threats on foot, and automatically categorize ‘what is a threat and what is not’ and then present that to you.”
Further, he spoke of the AI as a way to make all of the helmet’s capabilities easy to use without overwhelming the wearer.
“You shouldn’t be toggling between 10 different sensor menus. You should just see seamless view that’s built by kind of an AI interpolator that looks out into the world and says ‘ok well I know he probably wants to see all of the hot human signatures, I know he probably wants to see all the drones…’ you can build technology that is transparent to the user,” said Luckey. “[…] maybe I’m not the guy to argue that the tech is easy to use because I’m a hardcore technohead from birth and I can operate wacky stuff. But you can put it on a normal person… they can look out into the world and do things and see things with zero training that they never would have been able to do otherwise. I’m not concerned about information overload because I’m [confident in our ability to build the right tool for the job].”
Regarding manufacturing, Luckey said the Eagle Eye XR helmet will be built in the US or with US allies, with “no Chinese parts,” as a matter of operational security. He expects the first prototypes of Eagle Eye this year, and says the company already has working prototypes.
“We’re gonna be delivering the first prototypes to the army this year. That’s the intent anyway, if all goes according to plan in the way that I hope,” he told Vance. “But we’ve been working on the technology that underpins Eagle Eye for years. And we’ve been making a really serious hardware effort for over a year at this point. And so actually there’s an Eagle Eye sitting on my desk back at my office right now.”
Reunion with Meta and Zuckerberg
But how did Luckey go from having his VR startup (Oculus) acquired by Meta, then getting fired from Meta for political backlash, starting a military technology company (Anduril), raising it to a valuation of billions, and then end up partnering once again with the company that had booted him out?
Well, by Luckey’s telling, it started last year when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered a quote to an article about Luckey that was surprisingly conciliatory. That openness from Zuckerberg (and outright apology from Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth) opened the door to a renewed relationship.
“We ended up reconnecting [after the article], talking about some of the problems that are going on with America, some of the inefficiencies that exist for terrible reasons… how there are people who are dying needlessly because of barriers between our technology industry and our national security community,” Luckey said on the Core Memory podcast. “We ended up deciding that this was something that we needed to work on together. Meta’s been doing a lot more on the national security front; they’ve been working a lot more work with the government.”
Luckey says he’s moved on from any anger he harbored for his firing by Meta, saying that it’s a different company than it was those nine years ago—not just culturally, but also many of the people advocating for his ousting are no longer working at Meta.
Luckey sees the partnership as a win for Anduril (as it doesn’t need to rebuild key XR technology), while saving the American taxpayer from paying for tech that already exists in the private sector.
“[…] there’s a lot of things in Meta that I invented, my team invented, before they acquired [Oculus]. There’s other things that I invented, that the team invented, while I was at Facebook (now Meta). And there was a bunch of technology that was invented after I was fired,” he explained to Vance. “And this partnership is about taking that entire base of technology and IP—around hardware, software, in AI, VR, AR space—and applying it to solving our military’s most pressing challenges. It’s taking a lot of the people who have been working on these technologies for consumer applications and adapting their work to solve national security problems at a very low cost to the taxpayer.”
Luckey says the partnership will allow Anduril to build “the world’s best” XR tech for the US government and allies.
On the other hand, he said that the details of the partnership with the likes of Meta and Qualcomm mean that future innovations will hopefully trickle back to the consumer side.
“The way I see this is: the tech that we’re building—working with partners like Qualcomm and Meta—they’re going to be able to bring back into their consumer devices. And that’s the way our licensing agreement works,” he told Riggs. “The tech that we co-develop together… I’m the guy who is going to be deploying it to the military; they’re going to be the people taking it back into the consumer realm.”
It’ll be some time yet until we know more about what Eagle Eye actually looks like and how it works, but there may well be some overlap with Microsoft’s prototype IVAS system, as that’s the helmet that Eagle Eye is being built to replace.
