The struggling $22 billion US Army IVAS program that began in 2018 under a contract with Microsoft has offered engineers and developers painful lessons about too-lofty project ambitions and the physical limits of augmented reality glasses and headgear. Soldiers that tried IVAS (Integrated Visual Augmentation System) reported headaches, eyestrain and nausea. Early versions had problems with moisture, display glitches and low accuracy rates.
Lessons learned from IVAS have not been lost on engineers working to create AR glasses for enterprise use and ruggedized versions for soldiers and other military in the field using head mounted displays. The original set of IVAS project requirements is now viewed as overly ambitious and unrealistic by industry insiders. Apparently, suppliers are beginning to heed the lessons.
Military officials originally setting the requirements for IVAS simply wanted more than the tech could accomplish back before 2020, it is generally believed. “The government gave $22 billion to make those things and none of the soldiers ever used them. They made them sick,” said Adam Bull, director of program management at Vuzix in Rochester, New York, a supplier of wearable VR and AR display technology. He spoke in an interview with Fierce.
Vuzix is currently working on two AR development projects with military organizations that Bull would not name to bring AR-related capabilities to helmet and head-mounted displays. The projects are being finalized and will reach production "as soon as possible," he said.
From his limited description, it appears Vuzix is not developing products for the military clients that have all the bells and whistles of consumer or enterprise-grade smart glasses. Users will get information projected into their field of vision, but won't get geo-located images or eye tracking, for example. The limits are intentional.
Publicly-traded Vuzix has about 80 workers and was founded by Paul Travers in 1997. Second quarter 2025 revenues were $1.3 million, a 19% year-over-year increase. In addition to its work with military, Vuzix makes the Ultralite Pro, a smart glasses reference design for consumer and enterprise use that includes full-color Avegan LCoS projectors, a Qualcomm AR1 Gen 1 platform and binocular waveguide optics. It has an onboard camera, microphone array, stereo speakers and native Android for AI applications.
With IVAS in its early iterations, Bull said the Army set out requirements that said, “Here’s what I want the device to do, but that may not have been realistic to do,” Bull said. “Now that IVAS has fallen apart, other people are attacking the solution. Other branches of the military are saying, ‘We don’t need one size that fits for all applications. Now let’s focus on the minimum thing I need for this job and get that job done well.'”
Bull said the development projects Vuzix is working on recognize that different use applications may require different headgear. Military groups are “willing to develop separate devices for different mission sets,” he added, indicating a training application would be different than a battlefield application.
With the military AR headgear under development, the AI capability will be separated from the headgear and located in a body-worn computer. Vusix is bringing its own waveguide designs for the lens of the headgear and display engines. Bull described the display engine as a kind of legacy projector like those used in conference rooms “but way smaller” that shines light on the nanostructures in the waveguides, which then reflects that image back to the user.
Bull believes the ultimate technical roadblock with IVAS (at least in early versions) was that Army officials wanted the glasses to provide a virtual image to the user that was far above what was practical. Human eyes normally have a field of vision of about 135 degrees, but the virtual image sweet spot has been determined to be about 30 degrees. Meanwhile, the military has wanted 60 to 70 degrees for a virtual image that is reflected back to the user’s eyes. “That’s one of the biggest hurdles. Can you get away with 40 or 50 degrees and still have a bright display?” Bull said Vusix offers an image refresh rate to users of 60 to 12 hertz, which offers high enough resolution that is now a “very good image for users.”)
IVAS was “literally making soldiers sick, but our devices don’t do the whole AR interactive and eye tracking functions,” Bull said. Now the majority opinion is that “minimal [functionality] is the viable best way” to do AR. Nokia originally created waveguides and Vuzix has access to that IP for about 450 patents used in its products, Bull said.
What’s the status of IVAS today?
When IVAS first won development approval in 2018, Microsoft won the contract with early versions based on commercial HoloLens that were tested but not ruggedized.
Several iterations have occurred over recent years, and the Army procured 5,000 IVAS 1.0 systems in 2022 and another 5,000 IVAS 1.1 systems in 2023 with an improved low-light sensor. There have also been design changes in an IVAS 1.2 prototype in reaction to the reports of user headaches.
Current development is overseen by Anduril Industries in a partnership with Microsoft announced in February.
The project with Anduril was renamed Solder Borne Mission Command. Microsoft cloud and AI capabilities will continue as a backbone for the program, according to Anduril.