Palmer Luckey and Meta Join Forces Again to Build Military Grade AR Headsets for the US Army

In a move that’s turning heads across Silicon Valley and Washington alike, Palmer Luckey’s Anduril Industries and Meta have officially partnered to build next-generation augmented and virtual reality devices for the U.S. military. The collaboration, announced Thursday, marks a high-profile reunion between the former Oculus wunderkind and the social media giant that once fired him.

The project, named EagleEye, will combine Meta’s AR/VR technology — including components from its Reality Labs division and its Llama AI models — with Anduril’s battlefield-grade command software Lattice. The result aims to provide U.S. service members with a cutting-edge heads-up display of real-time intelligence and sensor data, effectively turning troops into what Luckey calls “technomancers.”

This renewed alliance comes as part of the Army’s Soldier Borne Mission Command (SBMC) Next program, a successor to the troubled IVAS project initially awarded to Microsoft. The IVAS program, once a $22 billion vision for HoloLens-style gear for soldiers, was largely stripped from Microsoft earlier this year and reallocated to Anduril for a fresh approach. Microsoft remains onboard as a cloud provider.

But there’s more than just tech at stake here — this partnership is deeply personal. Luckey, ousted from Facebook in 2017 amid political controversy over a Trump-aligned donation, took to X (formerly Twitter) after the announcement, sharing:

“It is pretty cool to have everything at our fingertips for this joint effort – everything I made before Meta acquired Oculus, everything we made together, and everything we did on our own after I was fired.”

Mark Zuckerberg echoed the mutual respect in a statement, noting:

“Meta has spent the last decade building AI and AR to enable the computing platform of the future. We’re proud to partner with Anduril to help bring these technologies to the American service members that protect our interests at home and abroad.”

According to reports, Meta and Anduril have already submitted a joint bid on a $100 million U.S. Army contract and will proceed with the development of EagleEye regardless of the contract outcome. Designed as a sensor-loaded system to enhance soldier hearing, vision, and situational awareness, EagleEye leverages commercially built high-performance tech to cut military costs, saving the government billions while modernizing warfare.

In many ways, this partnership marks a full-circle moment for Luckey. EagleEye was the name of his original concept headset pitched in Anduril’s earliest decks — one that early investors urged him to delay in favor of software. Years later, it’s finally becoming reality, and with Meta, no less.

To drive home the point, Anduril even launched an official Facebook page, a symbolic gesture confirming that the past is behind them and the mission now is national security.

With Meta now expanding its AI tools into defense and Luckey’s hardware dreams reborn in the military space, the future of XR warfare is arriving faster than many predicted — and it’s built by a team that was once torn apart.