Anduril, Meta win $159M smart‑glasses

Anduril Industries and Meta are working on military smart glasses inside the U.S. Army’s Soldier Borne Mission Command program, a prototyping effort that Anduril said carries an initial value of $159 million. The work sits inside the Army’s search for a replacement for the troubled Integrated Visual Augmentation System effort, now renamed SBMC, and pairs Anduril’s defense software and autonomy stack with Meta’s display and wearable hardware expertise. (anduril.com) MIT Technology Review reported on May 18 that the project is aimed at helping soldiers and drones share information and make decisions together through augmented-reality hardware and software. The contract itself is not for a fielded mass-production device yet. (anduril.com) Anduril said on September 8, 2025 that the Army award covers an “initial prototyping period” for a night-vision and mixed-reality system under SBMC. DefenseScoop later reported that the Army awarded more than $350 million in total SBMC contracts, including a separate $195 million agreement to Rivet Industries, indicating the service is backing competing prototype teams rather than selecting a final winner. ### Where did this program come from? The Army’s current effort is the successor to IVAS, the long-running soldier headset project originally led by Microsoft. Anduril’s September 2025 announcement explicitly described SBMC as “formerly IVAS Next,” and Defense News reported in May 2025 that the Army had stripped program management from Microsoft in February while keeping Microsoft involved as a cloud provider. (anduril.com) The Meta-Anduril partnership was announced publicly on May 29, 2025. Anduril said the two companies would “design, build, and field” integrated XR products for the U.S. military, drawing on commercial hardware, software and AI already developed by both companies. (anduril.com) ### What are Anduril and Meta each bringing? Anduril said Meta is one of several technology partners on the Army prototype alongside OSI, Qualcomm Technologies and Gentex. In Anduril’s description of the SBMC system, the device is helmet-mounted and is supposed to fuse day, night and thermal imagery with battlefield data into one display. (anduril.com) MIT Technology Review reported that the companies’ concept goes further than a digital map in front of a soldier’s eye. The magazine said Anduril has described a system in which soldiers could use eye-tracking and voice commands to interact with drones and other software tools, part of a broader attempt to tighten the link between human operators and autonomous systems. (anduril.com) ### Why does the $159 million figure matter? The $159 million number is the size of the initial Army prototyping award to Anduril, not the ceiling for the whole military smart-glasses market. Anduril has described SBMC as the Army’s largest effort of its kind to combine night vision, augmented reality and AI for soldiers, while outside coverage has tied the broader competition to a much larger long-term opportunity if the Army eventually moves to production. (anduril.com) The Army is also not betting on one design alone. DefenseScoop’s report on the separate Rivet award shows the service is still comparing approaches, which is typical for a prototype phase in a program that follows years of delays, redesigns and usability problems in IVAS. (technologyreview.com) ### Is this the same thing as EagleEye? EagleEye is related, but it is not identical to the $159 million contract announcement. Anduril introduced EagleEye in October 2025 as an independently researched and developed family of systems that builds on SBMC and SBMC-Architecture work already underway for the Army. (anduril.com) Anduril said EagleEye combines mission planning, digital vision and control of unmanned assets in a modular helmet-based system. That makes it best understood as a public look at the direction of travel: lighter wearable hardware, integrated sensors, and software that treats the soldier as part of a wider network of drones, radios and battlefield data feeds. That last point is an inference from Anduril’s product description and MIT Technology Review’s reporting on soldier-drone interaction. (defensescoop.com) ### What happens next? The next visible step is Army prototype testing and down-selection inside SBMC. Anduril’s September 2025 statement framed the award as an initial prototype phase, while later company materials said SBMC and SBMC-A were already being delivered and that EagleEye builds on those programs. (anduril.com) That means the near-term question is not whether smart glasses exist in concept, but which team can turn them into a wearable system soldiers will actually use. The named participants in that next step are Anduril, Meta, Rivet and the U.S. Army’s Soldier Borne Mission Command program. (defensescoop.com) (anduril.com 1) (anduril.com 2)