XR Industry News

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.

Meta officially confirmed the expansion of its EssilorLuxottica partnership to include a pair of Oakley smart glasses—possibly arriving soon.

Earlier this year, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Meta was looking to expand its line of smart glasses beyond Ray-Ban Meta, which would include two possible new devices: a sportier Oakley-branded model, and a high-end model with built-in display—the latter has yet to be announced.

Now, Meta CTO Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth confirmed that ‘Oakley Meta’ smart glasses are coming in an X post, showing a graphic of both brands merging and linking to a new @oakleymeta profile.

🤘🏼 @oakleymeta pic.twitter.com/lRL6oimgMR

— Boz (@boztank) June 16, 2025

Details remain scarce, however Gurman’s January report maintained the Oakley smart glasses would be designed for athletes and could launch sometime this year.

Meta’s EssilorLuxottica partnership has been growing steadily since the release of the first-gen Facebook Ray-Ban Stories in 2021, prompting the company to offer a second-gen version in 2023, Ray-Ban Meta, which which introduced updated styles, improved audio and cameras, and on-board AI features.

In late 2024, Meta announced it was expanding its smart glasses partnership with EssilorLuxottica into 2030. At the time, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described its long-term roadmap as giving the companies “the opportunity to turn glasses into the next major technology platform, and make it fashionable in the process.”

In addition to Ray-Ban and Oakley, the French-Italian luxury eyewear company owns other major brands, including Persol, Oliver Peoples, and Vogue Eyewear, along with eyewear retailers LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, and Sunglass Hut.

HP announced last year it was going to be the first to offer hardware based on Google Beam (formerly ‘Project Starline’), the light field-based 3D videoconferencing platform. Now, HP unveiled ‘Dimension’, which is being pitched to enterprise at $25,000 a pop.

HP Dimension with Google Beam is said to use six cameras and “state of the art AI” to create a realistic 3D video of each participant, displayed on a special 65-inch light field display with realistic size, depth, color, and eye contact.

HP says the device, which will be sold to select partners starting in late 2025, will be priced at $25,000. This notably doesn’t come with the Google Beam license, which is sold separately.

As an enterprise-first device, HP Dimension is slated to support Zoom Rooms and Google Meet, so it can do 3D immersive chats, but also 2D traditional group meetings, integrating cloud-based video services such as Teams and Webex.

“We believe that meaningful collaboration thrives on authentic human connections, which is why we partnered with Google to bring HP Dimension with Google Beam out of the lab and into the enterprise,” said Helen Sheirbon, SVP and President of Hybrid Systems, HP Inc. “HP Dimension with Google Beam bridges the gap between the virtual and physical worlds to create lifelike virtual communication experiences that brings us closer together.”

First introduced in 2021, Google Beam (ex ‘Project Starlight’) combines a light-field display to show natural 3D depth without the need for an XR headset or glasses of any sort—essentially simulating a face-to-face chat between two people.

In its testing, HP says Beam this makes for 39% more non-verbal behaviors noticed, as well as 37% more users noting better turn taking, and 28% noticing an increase in memory recall over traditional videoconferencing platforms.

Samsung Unpacked is expected to kick off next month with the usual slate of hardware announcements, which this year could include the company’s latest foldable smartphones, Galaxy Z Flip 7 and Fold 7, and its latest Galaxy Watch 8. Rumors suggest though the company is also looking to put its upcoming XR headset, Project Moohan, in the spotlight too.

Project Moohan was announced alongside Android XR back in December 2024, which will be the first device to run Google’s upcoming XR operating system. Samsung has said in the past that consumers should expect Project Moohan’s launch sometime this year, although it still doesn’t have a specific date or official name scheme.

Now, Samsung serial leaker ‘Panda Flash‘ reports the company’s upcoming mixed reality headset could finally get a release date there.

While were initially expecting to hear something about Project Moohan at Google I/O last month (we didn’t), Samsung might be keeping the device a little closer to home than initially thought.

Panda Flash, who has been following Galaxy Z Flip 7 and Fold 7 leaks and supply chain rumors, additionally reports the headset will launch first in South Korea, and then gradually launch globally sometime afterwards—essentially mirroring Apple’s US-first launch of Vision Pro before heading into other markets.

Samsung has shown its supposed Vision Pro competitor at a number of events over the past year, which includes our opportunity to go hands-on with Project Moohan in December, although the company has largely stayed mum on revealing the XR headset’s full spec sheet.

So far, we know the Android XR headset is packing in a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 + Gen 2, Sony-sourced micro‑OLED panels (resolution still TBA), pancake lenses, automatic interpupillary distance (IPD) adjustment, support for eye and hand-tracking, optional magnetically-attached light shield, and a removable external battery pack. It also supports VR motion controllers of some sort, although we haven’t seen those either.

We’re also hoping to learn more about the company’s smart glasses efforts; Samsung is reportedly working on a pair of smart glasses that could launch sometime this year—ostensibly looking to serve up competition to Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses.

Whatever the case, we’ll be looking out for official dates for Samsung Unpacked, which is expected to take place sometime early next month in New York City.

AWE USA 2025, one of the XR industry’s largest annual conferences, kicks off next week. We got a preview of what four interesting companies attending the event will be showing.

As far as industry events go, AWE USA has become our must-attend XR event of the year. It kicks off next week on June 10–12 in Long Beach, CA. As the Premier Media Partner of this year’s event, our exclusive exclusive 20% discount on tickets is still available.

We’ll be on site at the event, reporting on the most important developments. Ahead of AWE though we asked four interesting companies for a preview of what they’re bringing to the show.

CREAL

At AWE 2025, CREAL will showcase its Clarity light-field display. Released at the beginning of the year, CREAL has, since then, continuously improved the image quality by innovating on the spatial light modulator. Visitors will be able to experience the new display technology through a headset as well as a tabletop pair of glasses

XREAL

At AWE, XREAL will be demoing the ultra-popular XREAL One Series AR glasses with spatial computing capabilities. Also available for demo will be the XREAL EYE, a modular camera attachment for the One Series. XREAL will also be unveiling an exciting new accessory and showing it off in person for the very first time.

ForgeFX

At AWE 2025, ForgeFX Simulations will unveil VORTEX, a next-generation XR training platform engineered for high-risk, high-consequence environments where traditional training methods fall short. Built on the proprietary ForgeSIM framework, VORTEX delivers immersive, AI-enhanced, scenario-based mission rehearsal through photorealistic LiDAR environments, GIS-enabled sand tables, voice-activated SMEs, and real-time performance analytics—already piloted by JPEO-CBRND for CBRN response. ForgeFX is also debuting an enhanced Horizontal Directional Drill (HDD) Simulator for the Meta Quest 3 PCVR, co-developed with Vermeer Corporation, featuring authentic drill controls and a new Auto Rod Exchange module that trains on a previously unsimulated, safety-critical task. At Booth #346, attendees can experience six interactive demos, including the JLG Access Ready XR trainer, Somero S-22EZ Laser Screed simulator, CBRND HoloTrainer, Trumpf Laser Cutting simulator, ForgeFX Excavator trainer, and Ocuweld welding VR simulator, each showcasing ForgeFX’s leadership in immersive, equipment-integrated training solutions.

PICO

At AWE USA 2025, PICO will showcase the PICO 4 Ultra Enterprise, its latest all-in-one mixed reality headset designed for enterprise applications. Equipped with advanced MR capabilities and the PICOMotion Tracker for full-body and object tracking, the headset empowers industries to deliver highly immersive, practical solutions. PICO has successfully expanded into education, training and location-based entertainment (LBE), and visitors to the booth will have the opportunity to experience a selection of these real-world use cases firsthand. A private meeting space will also be available for deeper conversations about how PICO’s solutions can accelerate business strategies. PICO will also host two featured speaking sessions: ‘Unlocking the Potential of LBE: Scaling with PICO’s XR Solutions’ and ‘Superpowers for Spatial Developers: WebSpatial and SpatialML.’

What are you hoping to see from AWE 2025? Let us know in the comments below.