While Frayne and Hornstein would move on from the Ocean Invention Network to focus on Looking Glass Factory’s holographic devices in 2014, McRae’s component of the network, Octo23, would continue on until 2017. Octo23 began with a mandate as broad as the Ocean Invention Network’s: “clean energy, clean water, ocean conservation, and robotics.” But it later focused on OCTOtalk, a “proprietary technology to reinvent the diving/snorkelling mask enabling recreational divers and snorkelers to talk underwater” — a product that McRae then repackaged for the military.
McRae’s Mobilus Labs, founded in 2017, produces bone conduction communication technology that would later be combined with Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 in Trimble’s XR10 hardhat and, reportedly, tested by the British Army.
Hornstein ultimately departed Looking Glass in February 2021 — his LinkedIn status remains “tbd” — and both Mobilus and Looking Glass were listed among Time magazine’s “Best Inventions of 2021.”
McRae did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
ONE OF THE loudest voices in the startup scene evangelizing the promise of augmented and virtual reality systems for modernizing the military is Palmer Luckey, who founded the technology startup Anduril Industries after Facebook bought his first company, Oculus VR.
During a Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute interview in December titled “Into the Metaverse,” Luckey claimed Facebook’s rebranding to Meta resulted directly from the company’s 2014 acquisition of his virtual reality headset company. “Facebook paid a lot of money for Oculus — a few billion dollars — all the way back then because they saw that our technology was the key for unlocking the Metaverse,” said Luckey. “In a way, Oculus took over Facebook for the Meta rebranding,” he added.
Anduril has been promoting a relatively restrained approach to military adoption of augmented and virtual reality interfaces that emphasizes its usefulness for training. Its central product is Lattice, an artificial intelligence operating system. “I think soldiers are going to be superheroes who have the power of perfect omniscience over their area of operations, where they know where every enemy is, every friend is, every asset is,” Luckey exclaimed, during a 2018 speech.
Last year, in the Reagan Institute talk on defense issues, Luckey was brimming with excitement. “We’ve gotten some really big contracts with DoD including with the U.S. Air Force on the Advanced Battle Management System,” he said. “We’ve integrated our system as part of life fire exercises where we were tying together naval assets, air assets, ground assets, shooting cruise missiles out of the air with real gun systems on the ground — all command and controlled through a virtual reality interface.”
Just last week, Anduril executive David Goodrich posted on LinkedIn about the possible use of the company’s virtual reality headsets as part of its recent Underwater Autonomous Vehicle partnership with the Royal Australian Navy. The video that prominently plays on the company’s website suggests the use of virtual reality headsets for monitoring a fleet of its tube-launched Altius drones.
Anduril maintains a large team of lobbyists, spending roughly a million dollars a year influencing congressional budgets and Pentagon planners, and last year formed an advisory board filled with former top government officials. The board now boasts former CIA chief strategy officer Constantine Saab, retired Adm. Scott Swift, and Kevin McAleenan, President Donald Trump’s acting secretary of homeland security.
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