15 ms·
Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to supply AR headsets
- zabzonk 6y agoWhile I am not a fan of enormous military spending, any improvement on necessary targeting that possibly avoids frightened little girls running down roads with their clothes blown off after indiscriminate napalm strikes gets my agreement. This improvement has seen us hitting the targets like ISIS fighters accurately, rather than flattening the whole city they happened to be in. I'm not in favour of war at all, but as it seems it isn't going away any time soon, more effective and accurate targeting seems to be the way to go.
- curiousgal 6y agoMicrovision's stock shot up ~50% because of this. Their technology powers the Hololens 2 apparently.
- tartoran 6y agoMicrosoft's stock didn't budge. Is this contract going to go directly to Microvision?
- quickthrowman 6y ago> (MSFT) didn’t budge ??? The 2:00-2:05 (CDT) 5 minute candle for MSFT was a 2% move, that’s not nothing for a 1.77T company lol The candle low was 234.47 and the candle high was 239.10, this is in a 5 minute span
- tartoran 6y agoYou're right. I just expected a larger dent in price but you're right, MS is too massive. I should have said it barely budged instead. What's $21.9B among titans anyway?
- quickthrowman 6y agoIt’s a 10 year contract, up to $21.9B. The consensus forecast for 2021 revenue by MSFT is 164B, 2.19B is 1.25% of that.
- remarkEon 6y agoAnyone work this technology and can talk about it (without breaking whatever NDA of course)? I'm a former infantryman and ... let's just say I'm _extremely_ skeptical of this kind of technology for all but the most niche use-cases (think, AR for the driver in the hole of the truck). Obviously for pilots stuff similar to this has been around for a while, but the article is not really clear about how exactly this would be used.
- patagonia 6y agoIs used for me in 10 years when it all trickles down. I can’t wait.
- chrisseaton 6y agoImagine being given a mission and being able to recreate the target area in VR and walk around while you conduct your estimate, orders, and rehearsals. Or imagine being able to look over a piece of ground and see the location of your people annotated through AR. Or driving a route and seeing your planned route annotated. Yes please absolutely get this into my hands.
- Enginerrrd 6y agoOk, now imagine you have to hump an extra 10lbs of crap in 120 degree heat for weeks on end while the glasses are fogged up and you got a sunscreen smudge on the lens. And your field of view is now greatly complicated with extraneous information you don't need to know like ammo capacity of your current magazine. And you need to low crawl through a drainage/sewer ditch and through a hole in a fence to get to another position with all that crap on your head/body without getting tangled up. And now your patrol got delayed for some reason so now none of that crap is charged or working anyway. And your glasses or the controller got dislodged during a sprint to cover. Or you need to find the reset button for some reason. You can have my set. It might be a valuable training tool though.
- chrisseaton 6y ago> You can have my set. Thanks, I'll take it! You can say the same as you have about any technology. Why lug around a big heavy rifle when you could carry sharpened sticks? I guarantee you people said exactly the same about the first radios, for example. Now you wouldn't even consider leaving the wire without a radio under any circumstances whatsoever.
- paxys 6y agoPeople on the ground never have use for such tech. These deals are all political and the actual equipment arrives by the truckloads and sits unboxed. When people rant about ridiculous military budgets and spending it isn't about cutting soldiers' salaries but shit like this.
- ausbah 6y agogood for R&D I suppose
- paxys 6y agoPrivate, patented R&D which benefits a single trillion-dollar corporation funded by public dollars. Too common in this country sadly.
- quickthrowman 6y agoI own MSFT shares, why don’t you?
- verdverm 6y agoYou might consider the awesome open-source software MSFT is developing for this device, the Mixed Reality Toolkit, which many benefit from. There are ancillary benefits. MRTK also works for non-MSFT products and with Unity
- rtx 6y ago>corporation Public corporation, buy shares and enjoy the loot.
- axlee 6y agoIt's nothing more than welfare and stimulus that republicans can get behind.
- anon_tor_12345 6y agoThere's a very obvious analogy here that proves you wrong: nvgs
- mrkstu 6y agoAnd here, ladies and gents, is why companies like Microsoft, will eternally resist getting aligned with internal employee groups Resisting selling to government entities, whether ICE or the Army. There is way too much money to be lost.
- tmotwu 6y agoI mean, outspoken internal employee groups exist and higher ups acknowledge them. Satya drives home the empathy and feelings message more than any other CEO. And AFAIK, I don't recall an instance of Microsoft suppressing an employee's voice similar to what happens at Google frequently. They tried getting their employees to participate in their internal social networks but it never caught any attention. Microsoft just does a better job convincing their employees everything they do is for the greater good.
- gundmc 6y agoGoogle has also had several high profile cases of abandoning pursuit of extremely lucrative military/government contracts due to backlash from employees.
- encryptluks2 6y agoIf I had to choose between Google and Microsoft on which company I trusted the most to more good, I'd choose Google time and time again.
- mav3rick 6y agoLOL Microsoft has few forums to even voice your concern. You can't even share your salaries within Microsoft. It's such a joke to tout it as more employee friendly than Google. For starters it pays lesser across the board. Google has also backed out of many contracts when dissent was raised. The voices aren't suppressed at Microsoft, because there're no avenues to raise them anyway.
- tmotwu 6y ago
- mirekrusin 6y agoBlue screen of death can have whole new meaning.
- frisco 6y agoOn the plus side, this means we are much more likely now to get actually awesome prosumer/consumer-grade AR systems with many of the current issues worked out in the next N years. It's starting to get to a point where, though it's still kind of lame, you can see how it would be awesome, but still needs $B of R&D so... I'll take it.
- blunte 6y agoSure, but the process of getting there will either directly physically harm some humans or just otherwise be highly financially inefficient (in the case of developing wartime technologies which have no wartime purpose).
- megaman821 6y agoThese aren't bombs. A heads-up-display has more chance keeping infantry safe and reducing the chances of misidentifying an innocent bystander as an enemy combatant.
- blunte 6y agoIf infantry are more safe, they are more likely to be deployed. This merely prolongs the greater problem. I want everyone to be safe, but rather than providing various safeguards and defenses, I suggest we avoid the conflict entirely. Workplace accidents are still quite common, and that's a place that could benefit from heads-up AR type aids.
- verdverm 6y agoHL2 is the best device I've ever used, the future is definitely AR. Once you try it you will never want to have a smartphone again. Smart glasses all the way. MSFT just needs to miniaturize at this point, the UX is already there
- encryptluks2 6y agoYes, you now have a much bigger chance of getting your proprietary AR headset for $499 linked to your microsoft.com account with the development paid for by US tax dollars used to kill children in Yemen with drones.
- jtdev 6y ago“That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today's war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
- lvs 6y agoBSOD on your face.
- blunte 6y agoI don't look like a hippie, but I totally subscribe to the idea of "make love, not war". I imagine what the possibilities would be if we funded general non-military projects with the kind of money that goes into the military. Trillions have been spent on wars or war preparation, and of course the net result is worsening for humanity. What if instead that money were spend on helping humanity? Do we really need a conflict to be willing to stand behind an expense? Now in the case of AR, most of our lives are not lacking because we don't have AR headsets. But there are a lot of workplace (and entertainment) situations where good AR headsets would be beneficial or simply fun. Wouldn't it be great if that were a technology funded for the general benefit of all people?
- hayst4ck 6y ago> I don't look like a hippie, but I totally subscribe to the idea of "make love, not war". I used to be exactly like this. Republicans being bad faith actors and then asking democrats for unity is a key example to me of why war is inevitable and it's better to have all the power than no power. You cannot convince these people out of their delusions. We share real space, but have two mutually exclusive realities. We can't agree on masks, we can't agree on vaccinations. We can't agree that science is a higher authority than religious leaders. Half of America was almost "dominated" rather than compromised with. Our own cities were referred to as "battlespaces" and our own people were combatants. The democrats tried to make love (compromise) but failed to prepare for war. Then on the macro scale, I look at situations like China. China has no problem abusing human rights or acting imperialistically. America built business in china. America thought China would democratize, educate their citizens, and improve human rights abuses as its prosperity went up. In reality power was ceded and now we have both less overall peace and an ambitious highly nationalistic enemy with a weak moral system. Unless China deals with Xi and its nationalism, war is likely inevitable. How many conversations online have you run into where a person's stance is completely unalterable and a mutual understanding cannot be reached? Expand that idea to world politics. Pretend the issue isn't something trivial, but instead global warming or genocide. Who's side ends up being right? The one with more power. When you live in a moral system that says "do unto others as you would have done to you," it's easy to fall into the idea of make love, not war... But there are many moral systems, competing on the global stage. "Might makes right" is a moral system, "my culture above all others" is a moral system, "I will do anything to feed myself" is a moral system, "everyone should be made 'equal'" is a moral system, "the most effective competitor should win everything" is a moral system, "what my pastor says is the truth" is a moral system, "the emperor is the incarnation of gods will" is a moral system. You look at all the resources spent on military and ask "what's the opportunity cost." What's the opportunity cost of losing a war? What's the opportunity cost of ceding power? What's the opportunity cost of competing hegemonies? The prisoners dilemma is a dilemma. Cooperate is not always the best answer, and if you always choose cooperate when your opponent is defecting, you will lose.
- bronlund 6y agoSo that's like five headsets?
- ProAm 6y agoThe army probably misunderstood what they meant by telemetry.
- ghostwreck 6y agoThis makes me think of some of the battles that play out in Daemon and Freedom [1]. They're able to visualize all other parties in the area mapped by drones in real-time. They fight with massive AI swarms and are able to control the AI bots with hand gestures as they see them on the field, all while cruising around on modified motorcycles. We're in for a wild future. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(novel_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(novel_series)
- judge2020 6y agoMore fairly popular pop culture that this might mirror is the Black Mirror episode Men Against Fire where the AR implants are being used to trick their soldiers into thinking regular humans are some mutant creature to make it easier to pull the trigger and kill them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Against_Fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Against_Fire
- nahuel0x 6y agoSimilar to this great short "Uncanny Valley": https://vimeo.com/147365861 https://vimeo.com/147365861
- mrwnmonm 6y agoThey hope to train the soldiers with it, so they can be more ready in the real world? is that their thinking?
- uyt 6y agoI don't care how it is used as long as the technological advances transfer back to civilian headsets too. We already have unmanned weapons that can vaporize cities. Adding a human back into the mix doesn't sound all that bad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_inventions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_inventions
- bloopeels 6y agoWhat’s left for Microsoft to do? Open a Walmart-like?
- OnionBlender 6y agoThe funny thing is they actually closed (or are closing) all of their physical stores this past year.
- fasteddie31003 6y agoAs a taxpayer this seems like a waste of money. AR is just a novelty. If I were a solider in a firefight, I don't think I'd want some annoying UI in my eye telling me were to shoot.
- verdverm 6y agoHL2 is far more than a novelty, you should really try one out. Soldiers who have tried this absolutely love it and can see many places where this literally changes the game.
- politician 6y agoOn the other hand, if I were responsible for inspecting and maintaining vehicles or aircraft, I might find an AR HUD to be extremely useful. "Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics." - Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC (Commandant of the Marine Corps)
- dirtyid 6y agoProbably better investment than this: US Army trials augmented reality goggles for dogs https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54465361 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54465361 On the other hand AR has civilians uses. This is just US civil military fusion at work.
- bpodgursky 6y agoSoldiers spend about 1000x as much time training, inventorying, fixing things, learning, and communicating as they do in a firefight, and AR is potentially very high value-add in all of those spaces.
- RestlessMind 6y agoTaxpayers in 1970's may have thought of internet as "a waste of money" or just a novelty. Same with taxpayers in 2005 with DARPA challenge for self driving cars. Sometimes, you need government level entity to truly move the needle on technology and private sector is simply too short-term oriented[1] or too risk-averse[2] to take on meaningful challenges like moon landing or atom bomb. [1] VC funds have a life-cycle of only 10 years. Internet evolution was a 2-3 decades process. [2] Government can write off a loss of 5-10B. I can't think of any private sector entity with that kind of risk tolerance.
- king_magic 6y ago... but why? I'm not military, so maybe I'm just not seeing it... but what use cases does the Army really care enough about to spend $22B on AR headsets for? I could maybe see a billion here, a billion there... but $22B... on AR headsets seems batshit insane. Certainly can't imagine soldiers in a firefight keeping them on. Maybe logistics use cases? It was hard enough to find commercial use cases for HoloLens, so I can't even begin to imagine what is important enough to source this kind of hardware.
- screye 6y agoHuh, I find it weird that Amazon and Msft fought so rabidly for the $10B JEDI contract, and this $22B contract seems to have gone through without any fanfare. This is 10x what Facebook paid for Oculus. I wonder what MSFT showed to them in the demos. I imagine it must have been mindblowing.
- ahepp 6y ago>The contract could be worth up to $21.88 billion over 10 years, a Microsoft spokesman told Reuters could be worth up to I suspect those words are doing a lot of heavy lifting
- manquer 6y agoI don't think so, these statements move stock prices, so SEC regulates what a public company can put out in their press releases / statements like these. The open ended wording is more likely due to some variability in the services being rendered, for example there could be agreed rate for services with minimum and expected and cap on spends, however the actual value would change during the course of the project, with the quoted value being a reasonable estimate .
- manquer 6y agoThe JEDI contract was lot more competitive, AWS was technically on par or ahead of Azure, and they looked likely to be the front runners. Facebook/Occulus likely may not have been technically eligible- Holo lens and Occulus Rift are quite different platforms[1], or less likely Facebook was not interested in the deal[2]. [1] Typical for enterprise contracts, vendors make sure the specs are custom fit for their products before the requirement becomes public, dictating the specs is most desirable way to win a deal as vendor. [2] Given the size of deal unlikely FB was not interested, perhaps their B2G/B2M sales is not as strong as Microsoft to be able to win a deal this size.
- notional 6y agoWhat happened to Magic Leap? They pivoted to building their device for commercial use and had a bunch of military personnel images on their site before. -- Just did a search and found this Bloomberg article from 2018 about it and it mentions MSFT bidding on the contract as well, so it looks like they tried but MSFT won it. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-21/magic-leap-is-bidding-on-an-army-combat-contract https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-21/magic-lea...
- colordrops 6y agoConsidering that there are around 150 million taxpayers in the US, this is around $150 a taxpayer. That's CRAZY.
- verdverm 6y agoover 10 years, so like one fast food meal a year per person.
- quickthrowman 6y agoNobody tell this guy about the F35! At $1.7 trillion lifetime project cost, each of the 150 million taxpayers kick in $11,333.00 for one fighter plane platform
- LatteLazy 6y agoAfter the 7/7 bombings on the tube, people wearing earbuds or headphones showed much less hearing damage. Given the nature of battlefields anything that protects the ear seems like an easy sell to me. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/earphones-may-have-saved-victims-hearing-kh2j73rq9vf https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/earphones-may-have-saved-...
- mupuff1234 6y ago"Could be worth up to". Not quite the same as actually worth.
- cryptica 6y agoBRRRR, straight from the money printer. May the US taxpayer continue to subsidize Microsoft. May Microsoft continue to fail to deliver projects. I still can't believe people don't see what's going on. People must be getting dumber.
- IG_Semmelweiss 6y agoMilitary is one of the few functions even the founders agreed to delegate to the state. So, it is a bit strage to suggest we should reduce the military, to then fund someone's opinion of a worthy cause. (Yet i fully agree that current military spending is out of control and needs to be reined in massively) Aside from assumptions made on what is worthy are truly eye of the beholder, what about letting people decide for themselves? We are willing to explore our altruistic desires first....instead of putting others first. That's likely why we need a military in the first place.
- jedberg 6y ago> Yet i fully agree that current military spending is out of control and needs to be reined in massively Out military spending is 3.9% of our GDP. The worldwide average is 2.2%. So we aren't all that far out of line. Also, our military does a lot of humanitarian work (my friend ran a base in Ethiopia for example, and their entire purpose was to build water infrastructure there). The US is the "world police" in part because it protects the interests of US businesses. Peaceful areas are more likely to engage in international trade. We also do it for self-serving but peaceful reasons -- to extend the soft power of the State Department and aid in their negotiations (like building water infrastructure in Ethiopia). So I'm not so sure we're that out of line.
- graycat 6y agoTechnology, useful for the US military and also useful later for US civilians? Are there any examples? (1) US Research Universities. For nearly all the US research universities, a huge fraction of their annual budgets comes from Federally funded research grants via the National Science Foundation (NSF), but, trust me on this, passes Congress and gets signed by the POTUS heavily for US national security, i.e., the US military. As a result, the teaching is heavily supported by that funding. Else college would cost much more. Yes, not all the Federal funding is so closely tied to the US military: Since the Members of Congress also like progress in medicine, there is also a lot of funding via the National Institutes of Health for bio-medical research and, thus, support for the research-teaching hospitals. (2) GPS. The Global Positioning System (GPS), now heavily used for non-military purposes, was done by the US Air Force (USAF) and built on the work of the earlier system for the US Navy. GPS has been terrific for the US military. (3) Aircraft Engines. Aircraft engine development got a big push during WWI and then again during WWII. By the end of WWII, the best piston aircraft engines were mechanical marvels. But near the end of WWII, both the Germans and the British saw that just for military purposes jet engines would be much better. And the US saw the same: GE had been making turbines for supercharging the piston engines so with their turbine experience moved to make some of the best jet engines. With an aircraft engine, we use energy from the fuel to generate gas pressure to push mass out the back of the engine. Then the momentem of that mass (momentum is mass m times velocity v) provides force to propel the plane. But the mass moves out with kinetic energy (1/2)mv^2. So, we want to pick a pair, mass m and velocity v, to maximize the momentum for the given energy. Since in energy we pay for velocity v with v^2 but mass m with just m, we should pick the pair to have mass m large and velocity v small. So, going out the back of the engine (from a propeller or a jet) we want lots of mass moving slowly, not a small mass moving quickly. So, the US military saw this point for, e.g., their big cargo plane the C5A and developed "high bypass jet engines" where the turbine at the back of the engine drives a shaft to drive the compressor but also is used to drive a huge fan at the front of the engine that acts as a propeller in a duct to move huge amounts of cool air around, past (bypass), the engine and out the back. Now essentially all large commercial aircraft have high bypass jet engines -- the cost of jet fuel makes this crucial. Actually a little before the high bypass development, could also get some of the same benefits with just an aft fan: So, mount a fan, turbine, on the back of the engine. Have the fan blades relatively long so that they extend pass the flow of the hot gas from burning the fuel. Then the hot gas turns the fan and the extended parts of the fan blades push cold air out the back. A GE engine did that early on; the French Dassault FanJet Falcon DA-20 used two of those aft fan engines; and FedEx started with 33 of those planes modified for cargo. So, net, the jet engines used in commercial airplanes were heavily developed by the US military. (4) Digital Computers. So, sure, digital computers got developed in WWII for calculating artillery tables, etc. And after the war the US military was a big customer of digital computers and pushed the computer companies -- IBM, GE, Hewlett-Packard, Univac, Control Data, Systems Engineering Laboratories, etc. -- hard for more powerful computers. (5) Atomic Power. We have atomic power for the electric grid and applied nuclear physics more generally due mostly to developments paid for by the US military. Then it is common for the electronics on spacecraft -- often for science and not specifically for the military -- to be powered by nuclear power. (6) Radar. Commercial aviation is massively dependent on radar, and the first developments were for military purposes. (7) The Hubble Telescope. We can regard the Hubble telescope as used heavily for non-military science, but in simple terms the Hubble was a US military Keyhole surveillance telescope (supposedly can read car license plate numbers from orbit) but aimed away from the earth. (8) Rockets. Rockets are crucial for getting spacecraft into orbit (around the earth, the sun, Mars, etc.) or at escape velocity from the earth, and of course most of rocket development was for military purposes. (9) Optimization. Optimization, e.g., linear and non-linear programming, grew out of WWII military logistics efforts by G. Dantzig and others. Then asking for whole number solutions led us to the research on computational complexity and one of the most important research problems today, the question of P versus NP. (10) The Internet. Early on the Internet was ARPA-Net, funded by ARPA, the US military's Advanced Research Projects Agency. (11) The Interstate Highways. Early on President Eisenhower wanted the Interstate highways as a big contribution to US military logistics, that is, moving supplies and equipment.
- crakhamster01 6y agoReading through these comments, it sounds like most people assume these will be used as some sort of enemy targeting overlay for soldiers on the frontline. Is there any reporting to back this? My understanding was that HoloLens had found usefulness in enterprise settings for applications like machine/vehicle maintenance, quality assurance, repairs, etc. Why would that not be the case here?
- Arrath 6y agoI would expect the plan is to do it all. Logistics guy wearing a set checking in the latest supply run or flight, looking at a crate brings up the manifest of contents. Mechanic looking over an engine, overlay brings up blownup diagrams, teardown instructions. Squad leader can pipe in drone overflight feeds, target air strikes and support fires, etc.
- thr0waway7771 6y agoMy understanding of how Microsoft won this bid is they had a special team of Hololens developers work overtime to setup a special demo for the US Armed forces, where they rented out a warehouse and setup a maze. Then the armed forces decision makers could run around and "shoot terrorists" that were overlaid on their hololens. It is amazing a demo this stupid resulted in a 21 billion windfall for Microsoft. I'm only posting this because this is such a terrible use of taxpayer dollars.