Microsoft gets less budget for development HoloLens US military

A US Senate committee that oversees defense budgets has decided that Microsoft and the US military will receive less money for the development of the HoloLens in 2023. The committee is concerned about ongoing problems.

The problems would according to Bloomberg related to software, hardware and user acceptance and, according to The Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, have not yet been adequately addressed. As a result, Microsoft and the US military are only awarding $50 million instead of the $400 million requested for 2023. With this decision, the Senate committee, according to Bloomberg, supports the decisions of another US House of Representatives committee that has June of this year expressed concerns about the feasibility of the project.

Microsoft teamed up with the US military in 2018 to develop 100,000 customized versions of its AR glasses, the HoloLens headset, for $480 million. The adapted version of the AR headset was given the name Integrated Visual Augmentation System within the US army and is intended, among other things, to increase the situational awareness of US troops. The headset uses a night vision function and thermal vision for this. The health status of other soldiers should also be better estimated with the help of sensors.

In February 2019, some Microsoft employees wrote an open letter demanding that the project be shut down. That didn’t happen. A few weeks after the open letter, Microsoft and the US military announced a 10-year, $21.88 billion contract between the two parties to produce 120,000 customized versions of its HoloLens 2.

Integrated Visual Augmentation System