14 ms·

Army delays $22B augmented reality goggle program

104 points by infodocket 5y ago

trident5000 5y ago
In what world does it take 22 billion dollars to develop an AR goggle program. Its not a mystery why we have out of control spending and certain groups lobby and get wonderfully rich off the governments incompetence and corruption.
- ydkme 5y ago
  Two thoughts: - I'd be very surprised if Apple releases their AR headset without a similar-size (70% or more) investment over the preceding decade. RDT&E for environment-aware devices is incredibly expensive. - Defense funding and procurement amounts often shock those not in the industry, but the truth is that the entire market for most of what the DoD funds is...the DoD. Sure, a lot of the components and IP can be reused in the commercial sector, but for most programs the DoD has to fund both the initial R&D and the unit sales, because the market is so much smaller and device sales are heavily restricted (e.g. ITAR). The DoD also has MUCH broader and stricter requirements for security, safety, reliability, and compliance with a daunting array of standards and processes than the commercial industry. To be clear, this is on net a good thing for the DoD and by extension the rest of the USA, but it does increase development costs. Certainly there is profit being made by Microsoft here, that's kind of the point of partnering with the DoD. But the intuitive comparison of "DoD programs should cost the same as developing a commercial equivalent" that many of us make is fundamentally apples and oranges in both the product development and the economics.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  In a world where engineers at MSFT make $300k+ - that pays ~70k engineers for a year. There are nowhere near 70k engineers working on this - I'd be surprised if even 7k - but this has been in development for years, and will be in development for a few more. Depending on how many headsets they planned to deliver - I wouldn't be surprised if they each cost more than $1k - there are like 60k infantry soldiers - so that could easily cost >$60M. I'd imagine they spent >$100M lobbying on this and Jedi. I can't see how this would cost anywhere near $22Bn - but military contractors are known to have profit margins >30%. I'm obviously missing a lot of things - but I wouldn't be surprised if this cost MSFT >$10Bn.
  - texasbigdata 5y ago
    The headsets currently retail for $6k each and they are consumer not military specs.
  - wespiser_2018 5y ago
    The one piece of this that might end up costing a ton of money is the testing using live soldiers. Each of those deployments, along with all the heavy equipment is a lot of money. I saw they already have 80k hours of soldier feedback, so in part, that's where some of the money goes. The rest, of course, is figuring out how to make the HoloLens light and reliable, which no one has ever done. Idk, this could be a huge money pit. The Army has tried this idea before and failed. Now might be the time, or this could be another JSF spending fiasco. Either way, MSFT is doing well.
  - cryptica 5y ago
    This is job creation porn. These engineers don't deserve any public money, let alone to prop up their $300K per year salaries. Microsoft could get better engineers for cheaper. Including within the US. The problem is that this isn't about engineering. It's a scheme.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
      If MSFT could get better engineers for cheaper - they would. They're a business... Not a charity to engineers.
      - cryptica 5y ago
        This is BS. I know how the interview process works. All these big corporations optimize their recruitment processes around pedigree (matched to the curriculum of top universities). They don't look at track record at all; when track record is a far better indication of future performance. That's why their engineers are so incompetent and it costs so much money for them to produce anything. They have become so incompetent that they don't even have the talent necessary to know what talent looks like when recruiting. Corporate engineers will never hire other engineers who are better than them (for political reasons), so the engineering talent in these companies has been degrading for years as the bureaucracy and internal politics has increased.
- wespiser_2018 5y ago
  A maze or requirement, bureaucracy, and interoperability with existing and TBD systems? Software is expensive to build. Reliable software all that much more. If you consider an alternative, just make an app and stick phone on a rifle, sure, that will work for 90% of the stuff you want to do, but it would break and that's bad. A true "heads up display" that you can bet your life on, anywhere on earth, at any time, is just a truly massive undertaking.
  - dralley 5y ago
    I'm sorry but even taking into account the clusterf*** of government procurement this is a truly obscene price tag. Even by government standards, this is ridiculous. It's half as much as the development of the entire flipping Space Shuttle. It's more than Apple's entire yearly R&D budget. It's more than the James Webb Space Telescope and the entire Hubble program (including operations and the repairs that were needed post-launch) combined. It's roughly the cost of 8 Mars rovers of the same type as Curiosity / Perseverance. This is worse, even, than the Joint Strike Fighter program, which at least started out reasonably with only a pair of 1 billion dollar grants handed out to Boeing and Lockheed to develop two functional prototype fighter aircraft (never mind how the costs spiraled later). Setting aside the question of how much it should or shouldn't cost to develop such a product, it's absolute insanity to do it with a single massive project. The DoD loves to claim in public they're trying to be more agile, and this is the exact opposite of that. This ought to have been done $100 million (or less) at a time with limited initial scope and incrementally expanding goals. Don't make excuses for this. There is no possible justification.
    - whb07 5y ago
      I generally agree with you, but 2021 USD is literally trash vs 1980 USD. For reference, an ounce of gold in the peak at 1980 (which was a long while peak btw) was $800ish, an ounce of gold today is $1800. So more than 2x. So $22B today is more like $10B in 1980.
      - dralley 5y ago
        I tried to use inflation adjusted costs. The "original" development cost of the Space Shuttle was, actually, about 10 billion dollars. Which is around 49 billion in 2020 dollars, adjusted for inflation (gold is a poor comparison, it's closer to 5x than 2x).
- ahepp 5y ago
  It was a competitive bidding process, no? I don't mean to suggest there aren't huge problems with the army's acquisition process, but it seems no one wanted to make them for less.
  - trident5000 5y ago
    I dont think the list of contractors the Army considers is very deep; its not competitive in a true sense. That may be part of the problem.
    - ahepp 5y ago
      I think a lot of what stifles competition is the military itself. They aren't a good customer. They have lots of broken legacy systems. There are serious reputational risks. I don't really mean to suggest 22b is too low a cash prize, but I imagine it takes a lot to overcome the barriers that have been wilfully erected. Much less the ones discreetly erected by incumbent military contractors.
- jakey_bakey 5y ago
  Playing devils advocate here, Magic Leap has managed to burn through $3.5 billion and has made no achievements of note - instead of solving the two primary optics challenges of AR, they allocated their capital to make blacks look slightly blacker.
- m0zg 5y ago
  I worked with a Federal Contractor once (you, as a rule, have to go through a middleman to work with US Govt, and that's where most of the profit ends up). Their requirement was that we use their hardware in their datacenter to do our work and never move data out of there. So they asked us for configs. I priced it out, it came to something like $120K in total, sent them the specs. They tore it up and bought $1.2M worth of hardware instead. Insane CPUs, maxed out RAM, Infiniband, you name it. We didn't need any of that. Literally 10x the price. Ever since then I have extra bad taste in my mouth when filing my taxes, and I know for a fact that merely passing money through the government makes most of it disappear into a black hole.
  - hooande 5y ago
    The tax dollars didn't completely disappear. They were used to pay you and hundreds of thousands of others
    - m0zg 5y ago
      This is the classical "broken window fallacy", for which there are multiple convincing refutations. I'm sure you can find them yourself. But besides that, wouldn't you want most of your tax money spent on the things it is purportedly spent on (setting aside even whether spending it on those things makes sense in the first place, which is something we the people have zero control over), without leaving most of it in the pockets of whoever owns the federal contractor?
- greenreptar 5y ago
  it's "up to 22 billion over 10 years." So $2b/year once things get moving. They're still in testing, so likely less than that figure.
sneak 5y ago
A good reminder that working at MSFT means that your code may one day be applied in products used to conduct mass murder.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  So does working on Linux. Or like the 7zip lib.
  - memonkey 5y ago
    Think the difference is who is explicitly signing contracts.
- teakettle42 5y ago
  This is true working just about anywhere. I’m far more concerned about the demand-side of this equation.
  - sneak 5y ago
    > This is true working just about anywhere. I’ve worked at a lot of places, and none of the code I’ve ever written has been used to conduct warfare.
- Invictus0 5y ago
  A good reminder that working at Bell Labs means that your phone lines may one day be used by mass murderers. Technology is amoral; the science of the atom is not evil just because it led to the atomic bomb.
  - sneak 5y ago
    General purpose technology is amoral; specialized tools are not. Microsoft makes custom software for military applications.
- stefan_ 5y ago
  Remember, the F16 runs Kubernetes!
deeviant 5y ago
An actual news worthy event would be something like, "The Army's $XXB project two months ahead of schedule, and 5 billion under budget".
- h2odragon 5y ago
  That headline would be buried under reports of flying pigs, various people rising from graves, Hell freezing over, etc etc. But i might get my pink unicorn at long last.
debacle 5y ago
I wonder what the cost/benefit curve is for lobbying from $0. $22B is about $150 for every working American. It probably cost Microsoft less than $1mm to lobby for this deal.
- aardvarkr 5y ago
  Prime content for /r/im14andthisisdeep right here. It easily cost microsoft more than $1MM just to put together the proposal alone, much less fight for it in front of technical audits and careful scrutiny of every part of the project. Did you not read the article, which made clear just how much scrutiny is being applied to this deal? Do you think someone can just hand out a million dollar check and be given $22B of work without being qualified?
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    Not to nitpick but your post would stand on its own without the insult in the first sentence.
  - kaycebasques 5y ago
    No need for the disrespectful tone. You're violating a lot of HN's community guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - aardvarkr 5y ago
      Is having a disrespectful tone against the rules? Do I have to respect a conspiratorial comment as anything more than a shallow attempt to sow distrust against the government? I posted a critical comment that pointed out a significant flaw in his logic and I personally believe that it is indeed prime content for /r/im14andthisisdeep due to OP’s shallow attempt to understand how the world of government contracts and their callous disregard for any evidence to back up their musings
      - kaycebasques 5y ago
fsagx 5y ago
Seems like delay of such a big program would have at least a little negative effect on MSFT, but there doesn't appear to have been any at all.
- lucasmullens 5y ago
  Maybe MSFT is already locked in to the profits from the deal, regardless of delays?
- darkerside 5y ago
  Maybe the good news they didn't cancel it offsets the bad news that they postponed it
- wtf_is_up 5y ago
  Gov't acquisition always involves shifts 'to the right'. Even in 100x smaller programs than IVAS.
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
I recently bought my children an Oculus Quest because ... nagging. And I was utterly blown away. I understand why every billionaire is betting on this in some way. I would however put these goggles firmly in the camp of weapons like the tank that fires hundreds of missiles that fly off independently and destroy a hundred passing tanks. There is such a distance from "kinda works in demo" to "killing active enemy" that it is barely worth thinking about for five years or more. I would have to put other projects up top like - when all the civilian engine development turns to batteries and electric, how the hell do we keep our planes trains and automobiles running. Just how expensive will getting the gas get? - Do ship defences really work? I would want to be pretty sure we test fire every kind of drone and missile at real ships and see if they shoot them down. - In defiance of everything i wrote above, Apparently there is a cool targeting sight that puts a red dot on where the bullet will land based on distance, weather etc etc. It "apparently" makes every squaddie a sniper and is going to roll out to US army real soon. My question is once soldiers get out of a vehicle, how lethal is the battlefield now? What's the survival time measured in minutes under sniper and artillery fire? The last time the battlefield was insanely lethal people just dig trenches to even survive the day.
- mr_overalls 5y ago
  > The last time the battlefield was insanely lethal people just dig trenches to even survive the day. Trench warfare proliferated when a revolution in firepower was unmatched by similar advances in mobility. Most likely, ongoing advances in stealth, armor, area denial, anti-drone tech, etc. will preclude its reappearance on the battlefield.
  - Qworg 5y ago
    Also, among other things, laser guided airburst 40mm grenades make trenches not a great option.
    - horsawlarway 5y ago
      I mean, shotguns also made trenches a really not great option. Bad enough that Germany literally tried to get them banned, and considered them a violation of the Hague conventions... Video games make a joke of shotguns, but they're disgustingly effective in real life. --- "On September 15, 1918, the German government officially protested the use of the shotgun in a note verbale—an unsigned diplomatic note—transmitted to the Spanish Embassy in Berlin, then to the Swiss Embassy, and eventually to the American legation in Berne, Switzerland. The note asserted that the use of shotguns by U.S. forces violated Article 23(e) of the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions and warned that any American captured with a shotgun or shotgun ammunition would be executed."
frashelaw 5y ago
Horrifying to imagine such technology in the hands of the US military. The rest of the world dreads the death and destruction that will result from this, while brainwashed Americans cheer them on.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  This is just BS equipement. I mean you can't even wear ordinary glasses with a helmet without it getting in the way, bouncing around, fogging ... and they need no USB charging.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- doodlebugging 5y ago
  I'm American and I don't consider myself to be brainwashed nor do I find anything horrifying about this technology being deployed by our military or by anyone else's military. I think that once you have developed tech like this it is inevitable that someone down the line will attempt to fit it into their own use case. For heads-up goggles that incorporate real-time information and allow a user to understand more about their local environment than they could with their natural senses I think it is inevitable that a military use case would be high on the list. Once something like this is deployed by one nation, others find themselves needing to develop similar tools to maintain parity and they will focus their attention on meeting that goal or they will attempt to purchase or steal this tech from those that already have it. Will that lead to more destruction, more control of the globe by America? Is the rest of the world shivering in their boots at the thought that American troops may eventually deploy with these cool goggles? I doubt it. I don't know where you are from and I'm not in the habit of scouring other people's post histories in an attempt to find a reason to disagree with them or to criticize them. I just think you may be being a bit hyperbolic here and that you are failing to consider that the US military will not be the only military actively utilizing this tech. I think we should all, regardless of where we are from and where we call home, be mindful that a lot of the technology being developed in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs will have a potential military use case and that some of it will be actively financed and supported by governments to that end, knowing that there will also be civilian use cases that can be explored and commercialized. There is an active tech trend of improving tools that can be used for active surveillance of civilian populations; improving methods of identifying individuals who buy and use common products so that you can either slam them with ads for your product or use more discreet tools to suggest that they should switch products; developing technology that has the effect of throwing all of us into the pool of potential suspects, etc. Those things worry me more than any goggles will. A lot of people here on HN work writing the code that robs us all of our privacy rights, our individuality, our ability to live what used to be normal lives in relative obscurity. Those are the things that I consider more subversive since the people know in advance how their tool will be used and they actively work to optimize the functionality that in some cases actively destroys society and any sense of community that we formerly enjoyed. Perhaps a trip to the mirror is in order? You can answer that for yourself better than I can.
gigel82 5y ago
I've heard the contract team (PMs) over-promised (as usual) literal SciFi features that can't physically be implemented (especially around the size of the helmet). Engineers on the project are leaving in droves (we got a couple interviewing for us, but I presume a lot more are just moving internally) to avoid the crunch and (likely) eventual crash & burn (because if they can't physically implement the requirements today I doubt they'll breakthrough in a year).
- Frost1x 5y ago
  I've had multiple recruiters contact me this week representing contractual organizations working directly on and with aspects of IVAS. AR, VR, sensor technology, battery technology and portable computing have come a long way for certain, but most of what's being promised is just grandiose. I'm always surprised at how much snake oil and empty promises the federal government keeps buying in bulk. I realize why the DoD wants to invest in this, because you should to stay current if not ahead of adversaries, but why do they have to push it as a development effort when it's really a lot of research and exploratory engineering work. Does it take take big promise to get adequate funding for slightly less grandiose but still cutting edge work? The older I get, the more tired I get of the constant oversell in technology.
  - R0b0t1 5y ago
    I worked for a relatively mundane company that had to bid on government contracts. This lying made it nearly impossible to win bids for the longest time. Government was always happy to go with someone who was lying because everyone was lying and the one or two companies giving legitimate bids looked like they were below industry standards.
- greenreptar 5y ago
  Based on these conversations, I'm curious what you think the chances are of the Army's IVAS program being implemented by September next '22 as they're suggesting.
  - gigel82 5y ago
nova22033 5y ago
* “The devices met the Army’s requirements of rugged, waterproof and shockproof. But no one had considered, for example, that the headsets needed to allow users to brace a rifle against a cheek.”* I mean...
- remarkEon 5y ago
  Yeah, tell me you don't have any former Infantrymen on your product team without telling me you don't have any former Infantrymen on your product team.
  - Arrath 5y ago
    Designer's solution: a 3lb camera and battery pack you strap onto the muzzle to give you a Picture-in-Picture boresight reticle on your goggle lens.
    - Frost1x 5y ago
      Strap some remote firing mechanism on there and you can setup little remote controlled booby traps while you're at it.
josefresco 5y ago
While reading about this over at The War Zone* I found a video of "enhanced night vision" which looked very cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Poi0bOi91X8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Poi0bOi91X8 *https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42739/army-halts-widely-hyped-multi-billion-dollar-advanced-augmented-reality-goggle-program https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42739/army-halts-widel...
buescher 5y ago
Two things have kept "good enough" versions of these kinds of systems from being widely deployed: 1) Batteries are inherently dismal, and getting enough of a sci-fi aesthetic and feature set to wow the military brass will always demand enough power to be at the edge of battery logistics hell 2) Infantrymen will destroy any cable you come up with in five minutes
- sonthonax 5y ago
  In all fairness, trying to keep cables intact that are plugged into an overpacked rucksack and are attached to your head is pretty hard for anyone.
tech_timc 5y ago
Some decent pictures in this story: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42739/army-halts-widely-hyped-multi-billion-dollar-advanced-augmented-reality-goggle-program https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42739/army-halts-widel... This seems important. . . However, early prototype IVAS systems were simply not rugged enough for operational use, with one iteration notably unable to work in the rain. The Army has conducted more rigorous testing of the latest version, with what it had indicated were positive results. Soldiers have also experimented with using IVAS headsets within vehicles and during airmobile operations. Questions have also been raised about the conformal batteries that soldiers need to carry in their gear to power the IVAS headsets, both in regard to how long they can keep the systems running and safety concerns about what might happen if they get shot or otherwise damaged in combat. The Army has said in the past that it has made progress on improving the capabilities of the batteries and their resistance to incoming fire.
Shadonototra 5y ago
why title omits "Microsoft", don't want to hurt that company stock market?
aaron695 5y ago
Even if it worked ( which it won't ) soldiers don't want that shit in their field of vision. They want better data. AR won't magically give you better maps or weapons even if it's in the magic YouTube video. > All members of a platoon can know where all of their teammates are at a given time, no matter how dark or dense the surrounding terrain.” Cool, need to teach loitering munitions how to work this out on the fly and send in a payload. I guess look for the people with the frequency hopping ability. Maybe jam for a bit then see who hops. I'm sure it's complex but should be doable. In war zones you can make mistakes.
zenalg 5y ago
who are they going to kill?

104 points by infodocket 5y ago

In what world does it take 22 billion dollars to develop an AR goggle program. Its not a mystery why we have out of control spending and certain groups lobby and get wonderfully rich off the governments incompetence and corruption.

ydkme 5y ago
Two thoughts: - I'd be very surprised if Apple releases their AR headset without a similar-size (70% or more) investment over the preceding decade. RDT&E for environment-aware devices is incredibly expensive. - Defense funding and procurement amounts often shock those not in the industry, but the truth is that the entire market for most of what the DoD funds is...the DoD. Sure, a lot of the components and IP can be reused in the commercial sector, but for most programs the DoD has to fund both the initial R&D and the unit sales, because the market is so much smaller and device sales are heavily restricted (e.g. ITAR). The DoD also has MUCH broader and stricter requirements for security, safety, reliability, and compliance with a daunting array of standards and processes than the commercial industry. To be clear, this is on net a good thing for the DoD and by extension the rest of the USA, but it does increase development costs. Certainly there is profit being made by Microsoft here, that's kind of the point of partnering with the DoD. But the intuitive comparison of "DoD programs should cost the same as developing a commercial equivalent" that many of us make is fundamentally apples and oranges in both the product development and the economics.
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
In a world where engineers at MSFT make $300k+ - that pays ~70k engineers for a year. There are nowhere near 70k engineers working on this - I'd be surprised if even 7k - but this has been in development for years, and will be in development for a few more. Depending on how many headsets they planned to deliver - I wouldn't be surprised if they each cost more than $1k - there are like 60k infantry soldiers - so that could easily cost >$60M. I'd imagine they spent >$100M lobbying on this and Jedi. I can't see how this would cost anywhere near $22Bn - but military contractors are known to have profit margins >30%. I'm obviously missing a lot of things - but I wouldn't be surprised if this cost MSFT >$10Bn.
- texasbigdata 5y ago
  The headsets currently retail for $6k each and they are consumer not military specs.
- wespiser_2018 5y ago
  The one piece of this that might end up costing a ton of money is the testing using live soldiers. Each of those deployments, along with all the heavy equipment is a lot of money. I saw they already have 80k hours of soldier feedback, so in part, that's where some of the money goes. The rest, of course, is figuring out how to make the HoloLens light and reliable, which no one has ever done. Idk, this could be a huge money pit. The Army has tried this idea before and failed. Now might be the time, or this could be another JSF spending fiasco. Either way, MSFT is doing well.
- cryptica 5y ago
  This is job creation porn. These engineers don't deserve any public money, let alone to prop up their $300K per year salaries. Microsoft could get better engineers for cheaper. Including within the US. The problem is that this isn't about engineering. It's a scheme.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    If MSFT could get better engineers for cheaper - they would. They're a business... Not a charity to engineers.
    - cryptica 5y ago
      This is BS. I know how the interview process works. All these big corporations optimize their recruitment processes around pedigree (matched to the curriculum of top universities). They don't look at track record at all; when track record is a far better indication of future performance. That's why their engineers are so incompetent and it costs so much money for them to produce anything. They have become so incompetent that they don't even have the talent necessary to know what talent looks like when recruiting. Corporate engineers will never hire other engineers who are better than them (for political reasons), so the engineering talent in these companies has been degrading for years as the bureaucracy and internal politics has increased.
wespiser_2018 5y ago
A maze or requirement, bureaucracy, and interoperability with existing and TBD systems? Software is expensive to build. Reliable software all that much more. If you consider an alternative, just make an app and stick phone on a rifle, sure, that will work for 90% of the stuff you want to do, but it would break and that's bad. A true "heads up display" that you can bet your life on, anywhere on earth, at any time, is just a truly massive undertaking.
- dralley 5y ago
  I'm sorry but even taking into account the clusterf*** of government procurement this is a truly obscene price tag. Even by government standards, this is ridiculous. It's half as much as the development of the entire flipping Space Shuttle. It's more than Apple's entire yearly R&D budget. It's more than the James Webb Space Telescope and the entire Hubble program (including operations and the repairs that were needed post-launch) combined. It's roughly the cost of 8 Mars rovers of the same type as Curiosity / Perseverance. This is worse, even, than the Joint Strike Fighter program, which at least started out reasonably with only a pair of 1 billion dollar grants handed out to Boeing and Lockheed to develop two functional prototype fighter aircraft (never mind how the costs spiraled later). Setting aside the question of how much it should or shouldn't cost to develop such a product, it's absolute insanity to do it with a single massive project. The DoD loves to claim in public they're trying to be more agile, and this is the exact opposite of that. This ought to have been done $100 million (or less) at a time with limited initial scope and incrementally expanding goals. Don't make excuses for this. There is no possible justification.
  - whb07 5y ago
    I generally agree with you, but 2021 USD is literally trash vs 1980 USD. For reference, an ounce of gold in the peak at 1980 (which was a long while peak btw) was $800ish, an ounce of gold today is $1800. So more than 2x. So $22B today is more like $10B in 1980.
    - dralley 5y ago
      I tried to use inflation adjusted costs. The "original" development cost of the Space Shuttle was, actually, about 10 billion dollars. Which is around 49 billion in 2020 dollars, adjusted for inflation (gold is a poor comparison, it's closer to 5x than 2x).
ahepp 5y ago
It was a competitive bidding process, no? I don't mean to suggest there aren't huge problems with the army's acquisition process, but it seems no one wanted to make them for less.
- trident5000 5y ago
  I dont think the list of contractors the Army considers is very deep; its not competitive in a true sense. That may be part of the problem.
  - ahepp 5y ago
    I think a lot of what stifles competition is the military itself. They aren't a good customer. They have lots of broken legacy systems. There are serious reputational risks. I don't really mean to suggest 22b is too low a cash prize, but I imagine it takes a lot to overcome the barriers that have been wilfully erected. Much less the ones discreetly erected by incumbent military contractors.
jakey_bakey 5y ago
Playing devils advocate here, Magic Leap has managed to burn through $3.5 billion and has made no achievements of note - instead of solving the two primary optics challenges of AR, they allocated their capital to make blacks look slightly blacker.
m0zg 5y ago
I worked with a Federal Contractor once (you, as a rule, have to go through a middleman to work with US Govt, and that's where most of the profit ends up). Their requirement was that we use their hardware in their datacenter to do our work and never move data out of there. So they asked us for configs. I priced it out, it came to something like $120K in total, sent them the specs. They tore it up and bought $1.2M worth of hardware instead. Insane CPUs, maxed out RAM, Infiniband, you name it. We didn't need any of that. Literally 10x the price. Ever since then I have extra bad taste in my mouth when filing my taxes, and I know for a fact that merely passing money through the government makes most of it disappear into a black hole.
- hooande 5y ago
  The tax dollars didn't completely disappear. They were used to pay you and hundreds of thousands of others
  - m0zg 5y ago
    This is the classical "broken window fallacy", for which there are multiple convincing refutations. I'm sure you can find them yourself. But besides that, wouldn't you want most of your tax money spent on the things it is purportedly spent on (setting aside even whether spending it on those things makes sense in the first place, which is something we the people have zero control over), without leaving most of it in the pockets of whoever owns the federal contractor?
greenreptar 5y ago
it's "up to 22 billion over 10 years." So $2b/year once things get moving. They're still in testing, so likely less than that figure.

sneak 5y ago

A good reminder that working at MSFT means that your code may one day be applied in products used to conduct mass murder.

rightbyte 5y ago
So does working on Linux. Or like the 7zip lib.
- memonkey 5y ago
  Think the difference is who is explicitly signing contracts.
teakettle42 5y ago
This is true working just about anywhere. I’m far more concerned about the demand-side of this equation.
- sneak 5y ago
  > This is true working just about anywhere. I’ve worked at a lot of places, and none of the code I’ve ever written has been used to conduct warfare.
Invictus0 5y ago
A good reminder that working at Bell Labs means that your phone lines may one day be used by mass murderers. Technology is amoral; the science of the atom is not evil just because it led to the atomic bomb.
- sneak 5y ago
  General purpose technology is amoral; specialized tools are not. Microsoft makes custom software for military applications.
stefan_ 5y ago
Remember, the F16 runs Kubernetes!

deeviant 5y ago

An actual news worthy event would be something like, "The Army's $XXB project two months ahead of schedule, and 5 billion under budget".

h2odragon 5y ago
That headline would be buried under reports of flying pigs, various people rising from graves, Hell freezing over, etc etc. But i might get my pink unicorn at long last.

debacle 5y ago

I wonder what the cost/benefit curve is for lobbying from $0. $22B is about $150 for every working American. It probably cost Microsoft less than $1mm to lobby for this deal.

aardvarkr 5y ago
Prime content for /r/im14andthisisdeep right here. It easily cost microsoft more than $1MM just to put together the proposal alone, much less fight for it in front of technical audits and careful scrutiny of every part of the project. Did you not read the article, which made clear just how much scrutiny is being applied to this deal? Do you think someone can just hand out a million dollar check and be given $22B of work without being qualified?
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  Not to nitpick but your post would stand on its own without the insult in the first sentence.
- kaycebasques 5y ago
  No need for the disrespectful tone. You're violating a lot of HN's community guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - aardvarkr 5y ago
    Is having a disrespectful tone against the rules? Do I have to respect a conspiratorial comment as anything more than a shallow attempt to sow distrust against the government? I posted a critical comment that pointed out a significant flaw in his logic and I personally believe that it is indeed prime content for /r/im14andthisisdeep due to OP’s shallow attempt to understand how the world of government contracts and their callous disregard for any evidence to back up their musings
    - kaycebasques 5y ago

fsagx 5y ago

Seems like delay of such a big program would have at least a little negative effect on MSFT, but there doesn't appear to have been any at all.

lucasmullens 5y ago
Maybe MSFT is already locked in to the profits from the deal, regardless of delays?
darkerside 5y ago
Maybe the good news they didn't cancel it offsets the bad news that they postponed it
wtf_is_up 5y ago
Gov't acquisition always involves shifts 'to the right'. Even in 100x smaller programs than IVAS.

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

I recently bought my children an Oculus Quest because ... nagging. And I was utterly blown away. I understand why every billionaire is betting on this in some way. I would however put these goggles firmly in the camp of weapons like the tank that fires hundreds of missiles that fly off independently and destroy a hundred passing tanks. There is such a distance from "kinda works in demo" to "killing active enemy" that it is barely worth thinking about for five years or more. I would have to put other projects up top like - when all the civilian engine development turns to batteries and electric, how the hell do we keep our planes trains and automobiles running. Just how expensive will getting the gas get? - Do ship defences really work? I would want to be pretty sure we test fire every kind of drone and missile at real ships and see if they shoot them down. - In defiance of everything i wrote above, Apparently there is a cool targeting sight that puts a red dot on where the bullet will land based on distance, weather etc etc. It "apparently" makes every squaddie a sniper and is going to roll out to US army real soon. My question is once soldiers get out of a vehicle, how lethal is the battlefield now? What's the survival time measured in minutes under sniper and artillery fire? The last time the battlefield was insanely lethal people just dig trenches to even survive the day.

mr_overalls 5y ago
> The last time the battlefield was insanely lethal people just dig trenches to even survive the day. Trench warfare proliferated when a revolution in firepower was unmatched by similar advances in mobility. Most likely, ongoing advances in stealth, armor, area denial, anti-drone tech, etc. will preclude its reappearance on the battlefield.
- Qworg 5y ago
  Also, among other things, laser guided airburst 40mm grenades make trenches not a great option.
  - horsawlarway 5y ago
    I mean, shotguns also made trenches a really not great option. Bad enough that Germany literally tried to get them banned, and considered them a violation of the Hague conventions... Video games make a joke of shotguns, but they're disgustingly effective in real life. --- "On September 15, 1918, the German government officially protested the use of the shotgun in a note verbale—an unsigned diplomatic note—transmitted to the Spanish Embassy in Berlin, then to the Swiss Embassy, and eventually to the American legation in Berne, Switzerland. The note asserted that the use of shotguns by U.S. forces violated Article 23(e) of the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions and warned that any American captured with a shotgun or shotgun ammunition would be executed."

frashelaw 5y ago

Horrifying to imagine such technology in the hands of the US military. The rest of the world dreads the death and destruction that will result from this, while brainwashed Americans cheer them on.

rightbyte 5y ago
This is just BS equipement. I mean you can't even wear ordinary glasses with a helmet without it getting in the way, bouncing around, fogging ... and they need no USB charging.
deleted 5y ago
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doodlebugging 5y ago
I'm American and I don't consider myself to be brainwashed nor do I find anything horrifying about this technology being deployed by our military or by anyone else's military. I think that once you have developed tech like this it is inevitable that someone down the line will attempt to fit it into their own use case. For heads-up goggles that incorporate real-time information and allow a user to understand more about their local environment than they could with their natural senses I think it is inevitable that a military use case would be high on the list. Once something like this is deployed by one nation, others find themselves needing to develop similar tools to maintain parity and they will focus their attention on meeting that goal or they will attempt to purchase or steal this tech from those that already have it. Will that lead to more destruction, more control of the globe by America? Is the rest of the world shivering in their boots at the thought that American troops may eventually deploy with these cool goggles? I doubt it. I don't know where you are from and I'm not in the habit of scouring other people's post histories in an attempt to find a reason to disagree with them or to criticize them. I just think you may be being a bit hyperbolic here and that you are failing to consider that the US military will not be the only military actively utilizing this tech. I think we should all, regardless of where we are from and where we call home, be mindful that a lot of the technology being developed in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs will have a potential military use case and that some of it will be actively financed and supported by governments to that end, knowing that there will also be civilian use cases that can be explored and commercialized. There is an active tech trend of improving tools that can be used for active surveillance of civilian populations; improving methods of identifying individuals who buy and use common products so that you can either slam them with ads for your product or use more discreet tools to suggest that they should switch products; developing technology that has the effect of throwing all of us into the pool of potential suspects, etc. Those things worry me more than any goggles will. A lot of people here on HN work writing the code that robs us all of our privacy rights, our individuality, our ability to live what used to be normal lives in relative obscurity. Those are the things that I consider more subversive since the people know in advance how their tool will be used and they actively work to optimize the functionality that in some cases actively destroys society and any sense of community that we formerly enjoyed. Perhaps a trip to the mirror is in order? You can answer that for yourself better than I can.

gigel82 5y ago

I've heard the contract team (PMs) over-promised (as usual) literal SciFi features that can't physically be implemented (especially around the size of the helmet). Engineers on the project are leaving in droves (we got a couple interviewing for us, but I presume a lot more are just moving internally) to avoid the crunch and (likely) eventual crash & burn (because if they can't physically implement the requirements today I doubt they'll breakthrough in a year).

Frost1x 5y ago
I've had multiple recruiters contact me this week representing contractual organizations working directly on and with aspects of IVAS. AR, VR, sensor technology, battery technology and portable computing have come a long way for certain, but most of what's being promised is just grandiose. I'm always surprised at how much snake oil and empty promises the federal government keeps buying in bulk. I realize why the DoD wants to invest in this, because you should to stay current if not ahead of adversaries, but why do they have to push it as a development effort when it's really a lot of research and exploratory engineering work. Does it take take big promise to get adequate funding for slightly less grandiose but still cutting edge work? The older I get, the more tired I get of the constant oversell in technology.
- R0b0t1 5y ago
  I worked for a relatively mundane company that had to bid on government contracts. This lying made it nearly impossible to win bids for the longest time. Government was always happy to go with someone who was lying because everyone was lying and the one or two companies giving legitimate bids looked like they were below industry standards.
greenreptar 5y ago
Based on these conversations, I'm curious what you think the chances are of the Army's IVAS program being implemented by September next '22 as they're suggesting.
- gigel82 5y ago

nova22033 5y ago

* “The devices met the Army’s requirements of rugged, waterproof and shockproof. But no one had considered, for example, that the headsets needed to allow users to brace a rifle against a cheek.”* I mean...

remarkEon 5y ago
Yeah, tell me you don't have any former Infantrymen on your product team without telling me you don't have any former Infantrymen on your product team.
- Arrath 5y ago
  Designer's solution: a 3lb camera and battery pack you strap onto the muzzle to give you a Picture-in-Picture boresight reticle on your goggle lens.
  - Frost1x 5y ago
    Strap some remote firing mechanism on there and you can setup little remote controlled booby traps while you're at it.

josefresco 5y ago

While reading about this over at The War Zone* I found a video of "enhanced night vision" which looked very cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Poi0bOi91X8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Poi0bOi91X8 *https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42739/army-halts-widely-hyped-multi-billion-dollar-advanced-augmented-reality-goggle-program https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42739/army-halts-widel...

buescher 5y ago

Two things have kept "good enough" versions of these kinds of systems from being widely deployed: 1) Batteries are inherently dismal, and getting enough of a sci-fi aesthetic and feature set to wow the military brass will always demand enough power to be at the edge of battery logistics hell 2) Infantrymen will destroy any cable you come up with in five minutes

sonthonax 5y ago
In all fairness, trying to keep cables intact that are plugged into an overpacked rucksack and are attached to your head is pretty hard for anyone.

tech_timc 5y ago

Some decent pictures in this story: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42739/army-halts-widely-hyped-multi-billion-dollar-advanced-augmented-reality-goggle-program https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42739/army-halts-widel... This seems important. . . However, early prototype IVAS systems were simply not rugged enough for operational use, with one iteration notably unable to work in the rain. The Army has conducted more rigorous testing of the latest version, with what it had indicated were positive results. Soldiers have also experimented with using IVAS headsets within vehicles and during airmobile operations. Questions have also been raised about the conformal batteries that soldiers need to carry in their gear to power the IVAS headsets, both in regard to how long they can keep the systems running and safety concerns about what might happen if they get shot or otherwise damaged in combat. The Army has said in the past that it has made progress on improving the capabilities of the batteries and their resistance to incoming fire.

Shadonototra 5y ago

why title omits "Microsoft", don't want to hurt that company stock market?

aaron695 5y ago

Even if it worked ( which it won't ) soldiers don't want that shit in their field of vision. They want better data. AR won't magically give you better maps or weapons even if it's in the magic YouTube video. > All members of a platoon can know where all of their teammates are at a given time, no matter how dark or dense the surrounding terrain.” Cool, need to teach loitering munitions how to work this out on the fly and send in a payload. I guess look for the people with the frequency hopping ability. Maybe jam for a bit then see who hops. I'm sure it's complex but should be doable. In war zones you can make mistakes.

zenalg 5y ago

who are they going to kill?