Microsoft gets contract worth up to $22 billion to outfit US Army with 120,000 AR headsets

[Spartan]

The killer use case for AR/VR would possibly simply be warfare.

In the present day, Microsoft introduced that it has obtained a contract to outfit america Military with tens of hundreds of augmented actuality headsets based mostly on the corporate’s HoloLens tech. This contract could possibly be price as a lot as $21.88 billion over 10 years, the corporate says.

Microsoft will likely be fulfilling an order for 120,000 AR headsets for the Military based mostly on their Built-in Visible Augmentation System (IVAS) design. The modified design upgrades the capabilities of the HoloLens 2 for the wants of troopers within the subject.

“This system delivers enhanced situational consciousness, enabling info sharing and decision-making in quite a lot of eventualities,”  a blog post from Microsoft’s Alex Kipman reads.

The contract builds on the two-year $480 million contract that Microsoft gained again in 2018 to outfit the U.S. Military with augmented actuality tech. On the time, the contract detailed that the deal may doubtlessly end in follow-on orders of greater than 100,000 headsets. “Augmented actuality expertise will present troops with extra and higher info to make selections. This new work extends our longstanding, trusted relationship with the Division of Protection to this new space,” a Microsoft spokesperson stated in a press release despatched to TechCrunch on the time.

Microsoft says this announcement marks the transition from prototyping these designs to producing and rolling them out within the subject.

This can be a large scaleup for augmented actuality tech that has seen few large-scale rollouts and provides Microsoft a authorities contractor finances to sort out base expertise issues that might scale right down to client and enterprise-level units sooner or later. Most of the trade’s greatest gamers in augmented actuality have been reluctant or outspoken of their avoidance of navy contracts however Microsoft has remained undeterred in competing for these contracts.

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Some Microsoft employees asked the company to hold off on submitting for the cloud contract, and similarly, a group of employees called on Microsoft to cancel the HoloLens contract. “We did not sign up to develop weapons, and we demand a say in how our work is used,” the employees wrote in an open letter regarding the HoloLens contract.

Days later, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella defended the Army augmented-reality project, telling CNN that “we made a principled decision that we’re not going to withhold technology from institutions that we have elected in democracies to protect the freedoms we enjoy.” The Army, meanwhile, has suggested the augmented-reality technology could help soldiers target enemies and prevent the killing of civilians.