The future of soldier “super goggles,” designed to give frontline troops an AI-enabled view of the battlefield and voice command over drone swarms, is unlikely to look like the bulky, Star Wars-style face computer that might come to mind. Instead, the new tech may look more like the glasses you could see on patrons in a Brooklyn coffee shop, according to the company chosen to make them.
The Army has awarded a $200 million contract to a startup called Rivet to develop prototype computers, goggles, and watches to give soldiers a battlefield intelligence edge, as part of the Soldier Borne Mission Command program. A joint team from tech giants Anduril and Meta will also design a prototype for consideration under a similar contract, according to people familiar with the matter.
Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril, hasn’t been shy about his hopes to become the supplier of hands-free augmented reality kits for soldiers and, from there, build out an entire human-machine “ecosystem” to connect operators to drones and AI aides. And as the creator of the Oculus virtual-reality game system, he has something of an advantage. A February blog post featured him with a lab prototype of the Anduril system that looks like something out of science fiction.
But Rivet’s offering looks very different. Dave Marra, Rivet’s founder, told Defense One on Friday that his approach boils down to four words: “comfort, ruggedization, utility, and compliance.”
He sees his company’s prototype as a jumping-off point to connect soldiers with a wide array of AI capabilities through simple voice or other commands, as well as to connect logistics professionals, maintainers, and others with AI-enabled tools.
“These kinds of natural language interactions are the most critical element to enable,” Marra said. “So you think, ‘I have to control robots, and I have to do it without significant training and learning. I want to recognize nouns on the battlefield that could be a target: that could be a good guy, a bad guy, or another noun on the factory floor. I want to identify anomalies, more importantly, correlate in these data sets.’”
The end result is real-time predictive intelligence delivered directly to the eye—information about how the battlefield is changing and might change, or, in another context, which part might break next and what to do about it. Eyewear that sees probabilities in the future.
The project is part of the Army’s broader pursuit of soldier-borne smart systems, going back more than a decade, before even the Integrated Visual Augmentation System program, which essentially became SBMC. But prototypes from those efforts have faced a number of setbacks.
Now, Rivet has created what it calls an “integrated task system.” It features a small computer soldiers carry, as well as glasses capable of night vision, map display, and a wide array of applications. They look like something you could buy at the mall. That’s part of the point. They were engineered to be useful in conditions where earlier soldier vision displays failed.
“If you’re wearing a pair of glasses on your face, they’ve got to conform to compliance measures for eye protection—not only from a ballistics perspective, but also adversarial lasers. You’re not going to be able to get that at Best Buy,” Marra said.
The system also runs on Android, to better allow operators to configure features to suit their needs. That flexibility reflects the Pentagon’s new approach of pushing more command and purchasing authority down to individual units—the people actually using the equipment who need to adjust it for rapidly changing conditions.
Marra said the company is working directly with soldiers to understand those conditions, beyond scheduled touch points.
“We’ve gone out and tested it at a high frequency with operational units at scale,” he said. “Over the next 18 months, we’re going to do exactly that. In fact, we’ve programmed every 45 or 90 days, we’re going to be out with a minimum of a squad’s worth of systems, a dozen systems, and we’re going to go do soldiering with the soldier. We’re going to hang out with them every minute of that 72-hour mission, or every minute of that training evolution, and take your feedback and put it into the next iterative loop of hardware and software development.”
By contrast, Anduril’s offering is bolstered by the Lattice platform, an AI-powered software system that combines thousands of data streams into a single 3D interface. Lattice—more than the headset—is core to Luckey’s vision of building out the “human-machine ecosystem.”
But Anduril is not alone in that space. Palantir has its own suite of battlefield data-integration products. Marra, who previously worked at Palantir, described that company as a “strategic partner.”
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