According to the new disclosure, In-Q-Tel also invested over $1.9 million in Dreamscape Immersive, a Los Angeles-based virtual reality company. Co-founded by former Disney executive Bruce Vaughn, the company provides story-based virtual reality experiences, including the VR-based “Men in Black” feature released in 2019. As previously reported by Forbes, former Raytheon executive Dave Wajsgras — who became a member of Dreamscape Immersive’s board — has said, “The US department of defense is aggressively increasing spending on synthetic digital training which prepares personnel for real-life situations.”
Military interest in holographic imaging, in particular, has grown rapidly in recent years. The IDST article reported that military planners in China and the U.S. have touted holographic technology to project images “to incite fear in soldiers on a battlefield.” Other uses involve the creation of three-dimensional maps of villages of specific buildings and to analyze blast forensics.
PERHAPS NO INVESTMENT is as illustrative of the industry’s commitment to production despite potential red flags as the Defense Department’s flagship augmented reality project: the Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS, goggles. IVAS provides headsets to guide soldiers through unfamiliar territory, along with machine learning to instantly distinguish between friend or foe, and targeting systems for tracking vehicles and objects on the battlefield. (Investor presentations show the IVAS contract is also supported by Ultralife Corp., a battery provider, and Intevac, which produces night vision sensors and cameras for the defense industry.)
The Army has touted the system as a way to “fight, rehearse, and train” using “advanced eyewear that places simulated images in a Soldier’s view of real-world environments,” allowing soldiers to see through smoke or complete darkness.
The initial contract for the IVAS system, which is based on Microsoft’s HoloLens technology, was awarded to Microsoft and a number of other firms.
But the IVAS contract, which could one day cost upward of $22 billion, has faced chronic delays and failures. Last October, the Army pushed the official launch date to September 2022 for the product for operational fielding and testing.
The Defense Department’s 2021 annual report from its Director of Operational Test & Evaluation, or DOT&E, painted a sobering picture. According to the report, “Soldiers continue to lack confidence in their ability to complete the most essential warfighting functions effectively and safely while wearing the IVAS in all mission scenarios.” At worst, the goggles led to soldiers being unable to “distinguish enemy from friendly forces.”
But all such damning details were — despite congressional appeal — redacted from the publicly available version of the DOT&E’s report through being labeled as “controlled unclassified information,” or CUI. And while the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General made headlines last month through a report based on DOT&E’s critique, the underlying details remained redacted.
The CUI version of the Defense Department’s testing report was only made public through a leak to the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, where Grazier works. POGO’s primary reason for releasing the document was to help expose the failure of the F-35 program, but Grazier stated that he ultimately released the entire document in hopes of crowdsourcing the analysis of broader instances of fraud, waste, and abuse.
“If you can’t distinguish between a friendly troop and an enemy troop, then you’re going to have a very difficult time distinguishing a civilian,” noted Grazier. “If a soldier can’t identify friends or enemies with their vision system,” he added, “that tells me that system probably needs a lot more work or possibly needs to be scrapped altogether.”
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