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Microsoft’s contract with the U.S. Army to build a combat-ready AR headset is worth up to $22 billion, but only if the company can deliver the goods at “substantially less than” the projected $80,000 per unit, the Army tells Bloomberg. Requirements also include definitively positive field testing, set to take place early next year.

Based on HoloLens 2, Microsoft’s specially-built Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) has faced multiple challenges since being awarded the Army contract in 2019, including poor field testing results due to reliability and ruggedness issues. Despite recent improvements in the 1.2 version, such as better reliability and display clarity, and a flip-up design, the Army hasn’t scaled up orders yet.

While the contract stipulates the Army could order up to 121,000 of Microsoft’s IVAS, that’s pending further field testing—set to take place from April to June 2025. Price is also a “key factor,” Army acquisition chief Doug Bush says.

At the annual Association of the United States Army (AUSA) conference last week in Washington D.C., Bush said testing is “going much better than the first time around,” adding that “a lot of the problems have been fixed.” The Army still needs to “something that’s affordable” in order to cue up full production, however.

Unit cost is “a key factor next year when senior leaders make decisions about going into production,” Bush said. And the pricing goal should be “substantially less than $80,000,” an Army statement obtained by Bloomberg maintains.

Around half of the bill of costs can be chalked up to the system itself, which includes the AR headset—modified with sensors and thermal imaging—a battery, and chest unit for displaying information, such as the location of overhead drones. The remainder includes increased expenditures, such as Army program management to Microsoft engineering and software support, as per the Bloomberg report.

“We are going through the program to identify where we can reduce costs,” Microsoft’s Mixed Reality and HoloLens chief Robin Seiler told reporters last week. “It’s a fairly complex system, so when you look at cost reduction you have to look at it from a component level, from a labor level and from your supply chain.”

Despite best efforts, Microsoft’s contract may actually be at risk. The Army is reportedly preparing to hold ‘IVAS Next’ later this year, a new open competition that could see Microsoft replaced entirely as the prime contractor of IVAS.

Meanwhile, in an apparent bid to boost Microsoft’s chances at keeping the contract, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey’s defense startup Anduril has partnered with Microsoft to provide the combat-ready headset with its Lattice platform, which integrates real-time threat detection to improve battlefield awareness and survivability by sourcing data from drones, ground vehicles, and aerial defense systems.

Sightful, the hardware startup working to carve out a new ‘headless AR laptop’ niche, has cancelled plans for its $1,900 Spacetop G1.

Unveiled back in May, Spacetop G1 was set to be the company’s first commercially available product following the early access release of its first Spacetop, which delivered a somewhat bulgy laptop form factor tethered to a pair of XREAL AR glasses.

Now, the company tells CNET it’s cancelling Spacetop G1 altogether, and that pre-order customers will be are offered refunds for their $100 deposits.

Sightful says this comes down to difficulties competing with Microsoft’s own neural processing units (NPU), which are integrated into its latest generation of Surface laptops, as well as the usual cadre of partner OEMs, such as Lenovo, Dell, Asus, and HP. Those NPU-integrated laptops promise to improve processing power and battery efficiency when running AR applications.

Previously targeting an October 2024 launch, Spacetop G1 was set to use its own Android-based SpaceOS, running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon QCS8550 chipset, and exclusively tethered to the supplied XREAL Air 2 Ultra glasses.

Sightful, which secured $61 million in funding to date, now says its shifting focus to a software product for Windows laptops, enabling a similar AR experience, which will run Windows apps and integrate with Microsoft’s CoPilot AI features.

The company says its software will be available in early 2025, initially compatible with Xreal AR glasses via USB-C. More AR glasses could be added, however Sightful hasn’t shared any specific plans.

Furthermore, Sightful says Mac support will arrive post-launch, and there may also be the potential to expand beyond laptops, such as TVs and phones, however it hasn’t provided any specific timeline yet.

Samsung and Google announced in early 2023 that, along with Qualcomm, they’d be releasing an “XR platform” based on Android, which could also see the release of a high-end mixed reality headset. While we still haven’t heard exactly what that XR partnership will entail, a new report from The Information maintains Samsung and Google are also working on smartglasses positioned to potentially compete with Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses.

The report, citing insider sources, alleges Google staffers pitched the idea earlier this year of creating smartglasses with Samsung, which would ostensibly manufacture and market the device to include Google’s own AI efforts.

It was said Google created several smartglasses prototypes in a bid to interest manufacturing partners, such as Samsung.

One such prototype, which The Information reports is code-named ‘Betty’, had a monocular display—conceptually similar to the now discontinued Google Glass. Two other prototypes, code-named ‘Barry’ and ‘Mary’, were said to include stereo displays.

Notably, Meta’s Ray-Ban smartglasses don’t include any displays, relying primarily on voice commands and touch input for things like listening to music, taking video and photos with its on-board cameras, and doing casual AI web searches.

The forthcoming smartglasses collab is allegedly the result of meetings with Samsung executives early this year, Googlers such as Juston Payne, director of product management, and Shahram Izadi, vice president of AR.

There, it was emphasized that comparatively lighter smartglasses were more feasible than pushing for full AR glasses, such as Meta’s Orion AR prototype unveiled at Connect 2024 this past month.

In short, smartglasses with a display could provide the user basic content, such as text and directions, in a relatively small field of view. Full AR glasses would provide a more immersive, large field of view with content such as 3D objects and 2D windows that are anchored inside your real-world environment. Learn more about the difference between AR and smartglasses in our primer.

Whatever the case, we’re sure to learn more soon, as Samsung/Google/Qualcomm confirmed at Samsung Unpacked in July their Android XR platform will be revealed by the end of 2024, which may include launch details surrounding forthcoming XR hardware.

Meta’s biggest reveal at last week’s Connect conference was definitely the Orion prototype AR glasses, which the company says it’s been working on for nearly five years. It’s a big deal not only because of how compact it is, but because Meta says it wants to eventually turn the prototype into a consumer product.

You may have caught our high-level coverage of the Orion headset here, but our friend Norman Chan from Tested got to sit down with Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth to try out the glasses and learn about the Orion project. In typical form, he digs deep into the intriguing technical details of the headset. You can check out his full video below, or scroll further down to get a summary of the technical details Chan learned from his demo and conversation:

Although Orion isn’t ready for mass production, Meta says it’s planning to build around 1,000 units for internal testing. At a purported cost of $10,000 for each prototype, that’s a cool $10 million worth of hardware the company will be shelling out to get enough devices that it can do testing and development at a reasonable scale.

The Orion glasses weigh just 98 grams, which is right under the 100 grams threshold that Meta believes is important for making something that actually looks and feels like glasses rather than goggles. For comparison, the classic Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses weigh around 30 grams, and Meta’s own Ray-Ban smartglasses weigh around 50 grams. So the Orion AR glasses might be reasonably called glasses, but they’re still chunky bois.

Still, 100 grams is incredibly lightweight if you consider that Orion is packing most of the same fundamental capabilities as Meta’s own Quest 3 headset, which is more than five times heavier at 515 grams.

In addition to the novel silicon carbide lenses we heard about, which help the glasses reach a large (for their size) 70° diagonal field-of-view, Orion also employs MicroLED projectors which are not only tiny, but super bright. Meta says they can output hundreds of thousands of nits of brightness. It’s essential to start with such a bright light source because it’s a complex optical path that loses lots of light along the way. By the time it reaches your eyes, you’ll be seeing just 300–400 nits.

That’s a bit brighter than your average VR headset, but still a long way from bright enough to use outside on a bright day. You’d need around 3,000 nits for reasonable outdoor usability. That means Meta will need to find a brighter light source, or reduce inefficiency in the optical path, if it wants Orion to be something people will wear outside of their homes.

As for resolution, Chan says the main Orion demo has a resolution of 13 pixels-per-degree, which is a bit of a surprise. Because AR glasses often have a smaller field-of-view than their VR counterparts, usually they get an advantage on PPD because the available pixels are spread over a smaller area. But even with a 70° field-of-view, Orion has only about half of the PPD of Quest 3 (25PPD).

However, Meta was apparently also demoing a similar Orion prototype that was 26 PPD, but that came at the cost of image brightness. The company told Chan that its goal is to reach a resolution of 30 PPD by the time Orion becomes a proper product. That’s still far from a ‘retina’ resolution of 60 PPD, but should be enough to make the headset useful for text-based work.

One of the most interesting details from Chan’s interview was the way Orion glasses implement eye-tracking.

Like other headsets, the technique involves illuminating the eye with a series of infrared LEDs, then point a camera at the eye to reverse-engineer the position of the eye based on the visible reflection of the IR LEDs. Usually the IR LEDs are placed in a ring around the lens, but Chan noted that Orion places absolutely tiny LEDs directly in the user’s field-of-view—right on the lens.

In order to make it all invisible to the wearer, the wires that power the LEDs are arranged in a nearly randomized pattern that you could easily mistake as a bit of hair on the lens.

A random pattern is less eye-catching than a clearly defined pattern (the basis of many optical illusions). Between the random pattern, minuscule thinness of the wires, and nearness to the eye, Chan said it was all but invisible when looking through the lens.

It was also mentioned that the ‘compute puck’, which offloads much of the processing work from the glasses, uses a custom Wi-Fi 6 protocol to communicate, with a range of 10 or so feet.

The custom protocol purportedly focuses on ‘pulsing’ data from the puck (rather than continuously streaming it) to reduce both heat production and power consumption. We can imagine this being a packet-like approach where instead of communicating constantly from the puck to the glasses, outgoing information is gathered over the course of a discrete time period before being packaged and transmitted.

While the puck is plenty large and is said to be capable of “all day” battery life, the glasses themselves can currently run for up to three hours—essentially the same battery life you’d expect from a standalone VR headset.

Compared to research prototypes shown by Meta in the past, Orion isn’t just made to give people a look at the experience the company wants to eventually deliver. Orion is more of a preview of a product that Meta is actively building.

The company says it still plans to make the glasses smaller, higher resolution, and affordable. And so far Meta says it expects the eventual consumer version of Orion should become available before 2030 and cost somewhere around $1,500.

There’s even more details packed into Chan’s video than we covered here! If you want to hear it all, check out the full video.

Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, Meta CTO and Reality Labs chief, has publicly apologized to Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus who was ousted from the company in 2017 for political reasons.

To this day, Meta (ex-Facebook) never publicly confirmed why Luckey was fired, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg even going on record in a U.S. congressional hearing in 2018, saying Luckey’s ousting “was not because of a political view.”

It was however a political action that ostensibly gained Luckey notoriety among company leadership that led to his ousting in March 2017, only three years after Meta acquired Oculus for $2 billion.

“I got fired for no reason. I gave $10,000 to a pro-Trump group, and I think that’s something to do with it,” Luckey said in a 2018 Wall Street Journal interview, referencing his 2016 donation to an anti-Hillary Clinton ad campaign called ‘Nimble America’.

This has understandably left some bad blood between Luckey and Meta at large over the years, with Luckey exiting the consumer XR space entirely with the founding of his own defense technology company, Anduril Industries.

Carmack’s Regret, Boz & Luckey Showdown

Former Oculus CTO John Carmack, who left the company in 2022, reignited the smoldering flame this April in post on X, saying he regretted “not doing more to support and defend Palmer Luckey at Facebook.” According to Carmack, if former Oculus founders had united, things may have panned out differently.

“Unfortunately, FB encouraged “bring your whole self to work”, which meant politics was openly present, and rabble rousing was a thing,” Carmack said in a follow-up post. “I would guess that an employee referendum would have gone against Palmer, but it might have been different if there was a unified front of Oculus founders behind him.”

Additionally, Carmack said he believed Luckey’s firing was due to “hysterical internal employee pressure,” noting further he “[didn’t] think Mark Zuckerberg had a strong personal view on it.”

As a programming luminary and one of the clearest windows into Meta’s internal workings during his time there, when Carmack speaks, it tends to carry a lot of weight, which prompted current Bosworth to enter the conversational fray.

Responding to Carmack, Bosworth called him “woefully incorrect” on his speculation of an employee referendum to oust Luckey, further stating “I am not in a position to correct [,] except to say maybe don’t speculate!”

Then, when Boz claimed he actually defended Luckey before his ousting, it didn’t sit right with aggrieved party. Here’s Luckey’s response:

“Great story to tell now that I have dragged myself back to relevance, but you aren’t credible. You retweeted posts claiming I donated to white supremacists, and a post saying that anyone who supports Trump because they don’t like Hillary Clinton is a shitty human being. You publicly told everyone my departure had nothing to do with politics, which is absolutely insane and obviously contradicted by reams of internal communications. It is like saying the sky is green. Same goes for you telling people that I wasn’t pressured into saying anything untrue, that any mention of politics and who I was voting for was up to me. Can I post my original statement, the one that was explicitly rejected on account of saying negative things about Hillary Clinton, or is that still considered Work Product? Maybe you are lying, maybe you are just ignorant and willing to launder the lies of others about something you weren’t even around for, but don’t try to play the apolitical hero here.”

If you want to see two multi-millionaires who aren’t running for political office argue with each other, don’t miss the rest of the thread.

Boz Brokers Peace

Nearly five months since the online rift, Luckey was actually invited back to the Meta mothership for the first time since his departure in 2017, where he got a chance to not only try out the company’s Orion AR glasses prototype, but also received a face-to-face apology from Bosworth, which the Meta CTO echoed in a recent post on X.

“I’m glad you came by to check out Orion. I mentioned this in person, but I also wanted to publicly apologize for my previous comments about your time at (then) Oculus. I’m sorry,” Bosworth said. “After reading the recent Tablet piece I dug into some of the events that preceded my time when a different set of people who are no longer at the company were running the group. It turns out I was misinformed but that’s no excuse and since I wasn’t involved I should never have said anything. I’m grateful for the impact you made at the company and in developing VR overall. Looking forward to showing you more of our work in the future.”

“Thanks, Boz. Apology accepted,” Luckey responded. “I am infamously good at holding grudges, but Meta has changed a lot over the past 8 years. The people responsible for my ouster and internal/external smear campaign aren’t even around anymore. At some point, the Ship of Theseus has sailed.”

Luckey further stated it was “pretty surreal to be back on campus with you guys, Orion alone was well worth the trip. It is more or less exactly what I would have wanted to accomplish.”

The Tablet exposé referenced by Boz even had kind words directly from Zuckerberg, which Luckey highlights in an X post as not coming from the usual “PR flunkey”:

“I have a huge amount of respect for Palmer—both for what he’s done for VR and for now achieving the rare feat of building multiple successful companies,” Zuckerberg told Tablet in a statement this month, his first regarding Luckey in several years. “He’s an impressive free-thinker and fun to work with. I was sad when his time at Meta came to an end, but the silver lining is that his work at Anduril is going to be extremely important for our national security. I’m glad an entrepreneur of his caliber is working on these problems. I hope we can find ways to work together in the future.”