Microsoft will soon produce thousands of mixed-reality headsets for U.S. Army soldiers

U.S. Army to use HoloLens technology in high-tech headsets for soldiers

In 2019, as part of a new effort to develop advanced technologies to enhance situational awareness and capabilities for soldiers, the U.S. Army invited Microsoft engineers and other employees to a military base in North Carolina for a series of weeklong mini boot camps.

The Microsoft team learned about navigating on the ground, maneuvering in the dark and communicating in the field. The goal was to help the engineers understand the challenging environments soldiers operate in, then use that knowledge to design a mixed-reality headset that will soon be rolled out to thousands of U.S. troops.

“Because Microsoft was a non-traditional defense contractor, we felt like for them to be able to experience what soldiers actually feel and what they go through would help with making some of their technical decisions,” says Mark Stephens, the Army’s deputy program manager for the project.

“Some folks told me it was a pretty eye-opening experience.”

The exercise exemplified a unique partnership between Microsoft and the U.S. Army, which recently awarded the company a contract to produce mixed-reality headsets based on Microsoft’s HoloLens technology. The devices, using what is called the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), will allow soldiers to see through smoke and around corners, use holographic imagery for training and have 3D terrain maps projected onto their field of vision at the click of a button.

The Army plans to start equipping soldiers with the headsets in September, and leaders say the devices will fundamentally change how they operate and what they can do.

“Soldiers will be able to rehearse and train in more realistic scenarios using augmented reality to prepare themselves for what they are walking into,” says Master Sgt. Marc Krugh, a senior enlisted advisor who’s worked on the project since its inception.

“Inevitably, IVAS is going to save lives,” Krugh says. “That’s our main focus – bringing our men and women in arms back home.”

The technology was developed through a collaborative process that brought Microsoft’s user-centric design approach to the military for the first time. Microsoft worked closely with the Army in an integrated team from the start to better understand its needs and goals for the project. Soldiers came to Microsoft’s industrial design and software labs at the company’s Redmond, Washington, campus to test various prototypes and provide feedback, which was then used to develop the next version of the device.

By February 2021, the team had collected almost 80,000 hours of soldier feedback, including four rounds of testing within a six-month period during the COVID-19 pandemic. The group used Microsoft Teams to meet and share documents and Microsoft’s Power BI data visualization tool to track the status of the project. “The whole process was really iterative,” Krugh says. “Using the prototyping process, we were able to find out what works and what doesn’t work. Had we not received feedback from soldiers, we might have done the wrong thing and developed in the wrong direction.”

Microsoft Technical Fellow Alex Kipman, who created HoloLens and its precursor, the Kinect motion-sensing line of devices, says the Army’s level of involvement made the project unique. “It’s unusual for the government to have gone on this journey with us,” Kipman says. “I give infinite credit to the Army for their level of growth mindset. It was the right people with the right attitude at the right time to take the leap of faith with us.”

Soldier input directly shaped many of the headset’s key features. Early prototypes included a HoloLens headset that engineers had affixed cameras to, goggles with weights attached, and various 3D-printed devices. 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.

“If a soldier wanted to put his or her cheek on the butt of their weapon, if there were sensors on the bottom of the headset, they wouldn’t be able to do that,” Krugh says.

Feedback from soldiers also identified that the rim of the goggles needed to be redesigned for better peripheral vision. Dozens of prototypes were created, tested and refined.

“That allowed us to iterate and change and adapt and overcome issues that a lot of programs in the past would not have been able to do,” Krugh says. “Microsoft has been very good with soldier feedback, following it and identifying some things that just won’t work and then finding a different way to tackle those specific issues.”

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