Microsoft has Won a Contract with the US Army for 120K HoloLens

The contract worth nearly $22 billion and spanning 10 years will supply the US Army with HoloLens-based headsets to incorporate augmented reality into the military. 120,000 headsets will be delivered to the US Army over the next 10 years that will enable training via augmented reality and other machine learning enabled software.

Back in 2018 Microsoft won a nearly $500 million contract to supply the US army with augmented reality headsets and now images are surfacing of a much more rugged and customized version of their HoloLens appearing for the new contract. Since then, Microsoft has worked with the US Army to develop many prototypes of their devices and tools required for the military to achieve their training goals.

Overall, the augmented reality market has been stagnant in the consumer space lately, but the development side has been massively increasing between major tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook who are devoting exceptionally large portions of their staff toward research and development of augmented reality. Many experts believe that augmented reality will be a massive technology achievement once it is more practical and now that Microsoft has achieved a military contract utilizing this technology the development space and competition is likely to massively increase.

The Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) appears to be the system that Microsoft has developed based around their HoloLens and it utilizes multiple sensors along with military integrated technology like night vision and target acquisition but overall, the system is mostly unknown and even press releases from Microsoft have contradicted each other over the software and capabilities of the device. Although being a military device it is unlikely that we will get a full breakdown of the technology and software being utilized for quite some time.