增强现实耳机可用于体育训练ople, rehearse and even fight. Unlike Virtual Reality headsets, AR headsets project images and graphics onto the real world, overlapping with reality. Microsoft has just won a contract for such AR headsets. The contract was from the US Army to build more than 120,000 custom HoloLens augmented reality headsets.
The contract is worth up to about $21.88 billion, spanning over 10 years. Following the announcement, Microsoft shares went up 1.7$ to $235.77 per share on Wednesday. This might be Microsoft’s biggest contract that doesn’t involve their operating systems or any of their productivity software.
A normal HoloLens costs around $3,500 and enables hand and voice gesture interactions. Alex, a technical fellow at Microsoft, said in his blog post that “The IVAS headset, based on HoloLens and augmented by Microsoft Azure cloud services, delivers a platform that will keep soldiers safer and make them more effective. The program delivers enhanced situational awareness, enabling information sharing and decision-making in a variety of scenarios.”
Basically, it makes the training sessions feel more like games. Displaying a compass or minimap shows weapon crosshairs, and even thermal imaging to reveal people in the dark. The contract has a five-year base period with an optional five years depending on how Microsoft delivers.
This isn’t their first contract with the Army. Back in 2018, Microsoft has a contract of $480 million to give the Army prototypes of the Integrated Visual Augmented System or IVAS. In 2019, Microsoft secured a contract to provide cloud services to the Defense Department, beating Amazon.
Some employees have come out to say that “We did not sign up to develop weapons, and we demand a say in how our work is used”. This was written in an open letter regarding the new contract. The CEO Satya Nadella, however, defended the contract saying that “we made a principled decision that we’re not going to withhold technology from institutions that we have elected in democracies to protect the freedoms we enjoy.”