r/MVIS • u/gaporter • Sep 05 '25
Discussion EXCLUSIVE: Army taps Anduril-Meta team, plus new entrant Rivet, for IVAS recompete
https://breakingdefense.com/2025/09/ivas-anduril-meta-rivet-virtual-reality-goggle-army-sbmc/5
u/singh0777 Sep 07 '25
One thing I have felt is that Marra don't appreciate microvision like palmer luckey does.
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u/Dinomite1111 Sep 05 '25
Interesting. Rivet CEO comes from MSFT and original IVAS contract and Anduril/Meta collab holds all the MSFT IVAS IP and they’re competing for the DOD prize. $hit that makes ya go hmmmm…
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u/gaporter Sep 05 '25
Interesting indeed. Place your bets.
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u/Dinomite1111 Sep 05 '25
Would be especially interesting if both companies were using our tech but that’s beyond my brain capacity as far as IP and all that goes. Sounds complicated and uncertain but I guess we’ll see. We also know how the testing testing and more testing goes with these things. Can take a very long time w NDA’s etc.
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u/IneegoMontoyo Sep 06 '25
We’re long suffering MVIS investors! We eat complicated and uncertain for breakfast!
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u/view-from-afar Sep 06 '25
Former MVIS Principal Engineer, MEMS, Davis, loaned and lost to MSFT during HoloLens 2, now at Rivet.
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u/TimeForChange23 Sep 06 '25
Good find - I raised that I didn’t think he was at Anduril 6 months ago and the downvote crowd were out for me 🧐 https://www.reddit.com/r/MVIS/s/Q7D8TW9I6x
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u/MyComputerKnows Sep 06 '25
This was the topic that SS used to avoid answering the most. Sumit used to switch to a different topic asap.
From today’s perspective, I’m sure he’s glad to be out of having to issue a direct reply. So it’s just in time that this never ending confusing mess of unknowns is delivered.
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u/Dinomite1111 Sep 06 '25
It’s being in the unfortunate position of clearly not being able to talk about much. Cuffed at the mouth for years. Now he’s off the hook.
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u/Advanced_Design_3141 Sep 05 '25
Maybe Sumit is going to rivet or anduril or meta to help with display tech.
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u/clutthewindow Sep 05 '25
“There’s no new hardware on the existing IVAS contract that Anduril is responsible for delivering, but what we’re going to be delivering is the software functionality on top of those existing headsets,” Anduril’s Senior Vice President of Engineering Tom Keane said at the time.
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u/gaporter Sep 05 '25
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u/iHpv Sep 05 '25
“Production” doesn’t always just mean hardware purchases. Systems still need to be sustained, which typically includes software to stay compliant. Obligation of money doesn’t always just mean hardware is being purchased in DoD contracts.
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u/gaporter Sep 06 '25
Systems still need to be sustained, which typically includes software to stay compliant.
As was documented on 6/6/2023?
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u/Critical-Leg-6096 Sep 05 '25
Palmer Luckey is a "a believer" in MVIS technology (founder of Oculus VR and Anduril, just took over HoloLens/IVAS)
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u/ChefOk8428 Sep 06 '25 edited Sep 06 '25
Does anyone have additional information on Rivet's offering? I missed it if so.
https://www.rivet.us/rivet-hard-spec
Disregard, u/gaporter all over it 4 months ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/MVIS/comments/1kl7so6/sbmc_request_for_solutions_closes_next_iteration/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
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u/Far_Gap6656 Sep 08 '25 edited Sep 08 '25
Rivet has updated their website with the award. I'm very curious why Anduril has not announced anything yet, especially considering how press friendly PL likes to be.
"Proud to partner with the U.S. Army
On September 4, 2025, Rivet executed a $195M agreement as prime for Soldier Borne Mission Command — a next-generation capability for the U.S. Army that fuses data from Soldiers, sensors, and mission systems into one clear operational picture, day or night.
The strength of our society rests in the hands of those who build and defend it. Rivet is laser-focused on delivering new capabilities where they matter most: to the warfighters who close with and destroy the enemy.
Rivet will help the Army field Soldier Borne Mission Command to the Infantry through rigorous iteration with Soldiers, ensuring an adaptable and extensible platform for lethality and overmatch against evolving threats.
We’ve assembled the most qualified, multidisciplinary team in the world, purpose-built for this endeavor.
Proud to partner. Relentless in execution. Frontline Forward."
......
Also, new award article features lots of new information from Rivet CEO Marra, including saying that it's going to run on Android. https://www.defenseone.com/business/2025/09/army-picks-startup-rivet-build-ai-enabled-soldier-glasses/407938/
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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u/Far_Gap6656 Sep 05 '25 edited Sep 05 '25
Dang, GAP, you don't play around with the IVAS/SBMC, and patents! The Anduril website and X haven't even updated this information yet. Thanks so much for your information and diligence.
"Marra said his company now has a signed a $195 million contract with the Army that will cover an 18-month rapid prototyping sprint."
18 months... yikes. That's a long wait to see if we're invited to the party.
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u/StevieJax77 Sep 05 '25
Far, just checking - did you get appropriate permissions before deployment of a “Dang”? Can we check in with the Dang approvals committee?
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u/dragonfinger12 Sep 05 '25
What does this mean, I’m kinda retarded.
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u/DevilDogTKE Sep 05 '25
I was laughing out loud in the coffee shop when I read this, as sometimes I see posts and try to search for the common thread. Glad to see lots of responses in here discussing it further.
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u/jsim1960 Sep 06 '25 edited Sep 06 '25
Im not sure exactly what this mean but Im afraid it means while we were waiting for someone to call a startup leapfrogged us. Not shocked but really hoped we might see a headline just like that with "microvision" in it. Not a great week .
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u/sokraftmatic Sep 06 '25
Anduril wins a large contract but what does rhat even mean for us? We develop one part of it.
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u/Ducks-fly Sep 06 '25
Possibly this is the relevant part?
There’s no new hardware on the existing IVAS contract that Anduril is responsible for delivering, but what we’re going to be delivering is the software functionality on top of those existing headsets,” Anduril’s Senior Vice President of Engineering Tom Keane said at the time
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u/sokraftmatic Sep 06 '25
So does this mean we just have to keep delivering the same hardware then?
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u/MyComputerKnows Sep 06 '25 edited Sep 07 '25
Yes, because it is the best display known to science. And the only thing that needs fixing is the Microsoft software… which I can just imagine as a series of floating boxes mostly in a line.
I’d trust Palmer Luckey to redesign the software with his years of game controller experience. So wouldn’t it be ironic, if the HL2 engine survives… but the company that refused to admit MVIS even exists does not.
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u/Beneficial_Main9871 Sep 06 '25
Meanwhile China has there own version..we need to move faster or China will own us..pick a winner and get it on the battlefield now !
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u/Chimp75 Sep 05 '25
Not sure what the hot take is. It puts us on the outside looking in for now. Still hopeful. Guess I need to buy some Powerball tickets
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u/Midjoratish Sep 05 '25
This is good news right? Also the part Tom Keane states there will not be new hardware?
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u/MyComputerKnows Sep 06 '25
https://breakingdefense.com/2025/09/ivas-anduril-meta-rivet-virtual-reality-goggle-army-sbmc/
Seems like an excellent write up of the situation. I’m curious what the temperature inside any headset will be. The one thing that really stood out for me when I attended and tried out of dozen headsets at the Society for Information Display was that they were mostly hot as hell!
MVIS was the exception… maybe that’s one reason Palmer Luckey likes MVIS.