Soon after Congress put $349 million of its IVAS funding on hold in March, Insider reported on a leaked Microsoft memo in which a manager wrote that the company “expect[s] soldier sentiment to continue to be negative as reliability improvements have been minimal from previous events.” HoloLens boss Alex Kipman reportedly described his team as “[s]o depressed, so demoralized, so broken.” The Wall Street Journal reported that roughly 100 Microsoft HoloLens employees left to work at Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc. in 2021.
In February, Secretary of the U.S. Air Force Christine Wormuth also poured cold water on the project, at an event for the Center for a New American Security, tempering expectations.
“Remember early satellite phones from the 1980s that wealthy people had in their cars?” said Wormuth during the event. “They were big and clunky and now we have iPhones. It took us some time to get there. The first iteration of IVAS may not be quite as streamlined as we want it to be ultimately, but it’s the alpha version, and we need to start there.”
The military, including soldiers at Fort Benning, have found some productive applications of the IVAS system. Rather than forming the basis of futuristic cyborg warriors, the HoloLens goggles have been an expensive thermal sensor for rapidly detecting soldier temperatures — as a way to screen Covid-19 cases.
IN-Q-TEL HAS A history of working closely with companies that have commercial success providing consumer products while developing innovations with military applications. The investment fund, for instance, backed a skin care company with a line of popular beauty products that had created a method for removing biomarkers that could be used for intelligence purposes. AR and VR technology appears to follow the same track, where consumer products are helping fuel the advancement of innovations that can be one day used for the military.
Before founding Looking Glass Factory in 2014, their CEO, Shawn Frayne and then-CTO Alex Hornstein had each run separate pieces of the Ocean Invention Network, an interconnected group of inventor labs. Press coverage in early 2013 described the network as “an indie rock supergroup of the cleantech scene; Haddock Invention, which opened shop in 2006, is on lead guitar, while Mantis Shrimp Invention, opened in Manila (Philippines) by Alex Hornstein in 2012, hits the drums. The Solar Pocket Factory … is their hit single.”
Frayne and Hornstein had both completed bachelors of science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 2000s: Frayne in physics in 2003 and Hornstein in electrical engineering in 2007. Their third partner was Jordan McRae, who finished his B.S. in aerospace engineering at MIT in 2005 (and spent two years working for Lockheed Martin before joining the Ocean Invention Network as CTO of Humdinger Wind Energy under Frayne).
Frayne and Hornstein’s Haddock and Mantis Shrimp labs would collaborate on Solar Pocket Factory, a “coffee-table size machine that makes panels small enough to power pocket-size devices.” As reported by Fast Company, the effort raised $78,000 via Kickstarter in 2012 but by the end of 2013, Frayne and Hornstein had pivoted to purchasing solar panels from a factory in Dongguan, China, adding the ability to control them with a cellphone, then renting them out for $1.50 to $2 per week. They would partner with a utility company in the Philippines as part of a trial on top of 20 homes in the island of Alibijaban. (This last incarnation was called Tiny Pipes.)
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