The militarisation of immersive technology — where will it lead and at what societal cost? - ABC Religion & Ethics

Australia Broadcast Center

2 days ago

Last week, American defence technology company Anduril announced a surprising new partnership: it will be working with Meta to develop virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets for the United States military.
At first glance, the collaboration might seem an unlikely one. Anduril's founder, Palmer Luckey, was also the founder of Oculus — the VR company that Meta (then Facebook) acquired in 2014 for $2 billion. Luckey was later fired from Facebook and went on to establish Anduril, a company now known for its autonomous surveillance systems and AI-enabled drones (which it develops for militaries, including the United States and Australia). For Luckey, this partnership between Meta and the US military reflects a long-standing ambition: 'My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers', he wrote on X, 'and the products we are building with Meta do just that.'
Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril Industries, during an interview at Anduril's headquarters in Costa Mesa, California, on 14 December 2023. (Photographer: Kyle Grillot / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
While the partnership is new, the use of VR and AR in military contexts is not. In fact, the roots of immersive tech are deeply entangled with the history of warfare.
A history of violence
The history of VR's development is closely linked with the militarised history of computing. During the Second World War, early computing efforts were shaped by the needs of aerial defence and ballistics, fields that demanded new ways to augment human perception and response time. Areas of wartime innovation — such as cybernetics — were concerned with understanding the relationship between human cognition and machines, and specifically with addressing the cognitive limits of humans in wartime situations.
One of VR's early pioneers, Ivan Sutherland, developed 'The Ultimate Display' in the 1960s, a kind of proto-AR headset designed to be mounted in helicopters. Sutherland was connected to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the US military's advanced research arm, and his work on the Ultimate Display received funding from Bell Helicopter, which was a contractor for the US military during the Vietnam war.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, similar immersive display systems became central to Air Force training and simulation programs. Running parallel to these developments, early haptic technologies — tools to simulate physical touch, and the manipulation of objects through teleoperation — were also developed, including the teleoperator systems created at Argonne National Laboratory by Raymond Goertz in the postwar period.
HoloLens 2, an AR headset designed by Microsoft, exhibited during the Mobile World Congress, on 28 February 2019 in Barcelona, Spain. (Photographer: Joan Cros / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Military use remains one of the most well-funded and actively developed applications of immersive tech. In 2022, for example, Microsoft secured a US Army contract worth nearly $22 billion to supply 120,000 HoloLens AR headsets for battlefield use. The program was eventually scaled back and, in 2024, Microsoft announced that Anduril would take over the project. The US military has likewise experimented with VR for training purposes, such as its recent investment in what it calls a 'Synthetic Training Environment'.
Unlike many of its peers in the so-called 'Magnificent Seven' — the largest US tech firms: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla — Meta has thus far avoided working with the military. But its continued investment in immersive tech — more than US$45 billion since 2018, by some estimates — has failed to yield a clear consumer market. VR headsets remain a relatively small segment of the computing market, with some reports suggesting 20 million sales of all Quest headsets in the four years since their 2019 debut. Meta's smart glasses have gained more traction but currently lack full AR capabilities and raise ongoing safety and privacy concerns.
Why the pivot to military applications?
In the absence of mass-market adoption, tech firms often turn to institutional settings to create demand and legitimacy for a product. Defence is particularly attractive. Not only does work with militaries have the potential for access to large budgets that can subsidise research and development, but it is also a pathway to embed emerging technologies into critical infrastructure. Historically, this is how many now-ubiquitous technologies — like computing and the internet — got their start.
Meta, like others before it, is likely trying to manufacture infrastructural necessity. If there's no widespread consumer demand, then the next best thing is to make the technology essential somewhere else — whether that's in the workplace, the classroom or the battlefield.
What's at stake?
For one, it's unclear whether Luckey's vision of AR- and VR-equipped 'technomancers' can ever truly materialise. Following Microsoft's military headset deployment, many soldiers reported symptoms like nausea, disorientation and eye strain. Beyond physiological effects, as we argue in our recent book Fantasies of Virtual Reality , questions remain about the reliability of embedded systems such as facial recognition or battlefield AI — technologies known for their bias, opacity and error-prone design. We should proceed with caution in implementing them into technologies like AR and VR.
A member of the Saarland Parliament tries out a mobile extended reality system from HGXR for training security forces using AI-supported virtual reality, at the 28th European Police Congress in Berlin, Germany. (Photographer: Bernd von Jutrczenka / picture alliance via Getty Images)
More broadly, there are concerns about the societal implications of militarised tech. As with many other technologies, military-developed tools have a tendency to spill over into civilian life. We already see these immersive technologies being adopted by police forces — from AR-equipped smart glasses to ostensibly better identify threat, to VR-based 'empathy training' in law enforcement.
The geographer Stephen Graham calls this the 'militarisation of everyday life': a creeping process where technologies and logics of war — tracking, profiling, sorting — bleed into systems of civil governance. The very same immersive technologies being designed for combat may soon shape how cities are policed, how workers are trained, or how citizens are monitored. As we are exploring in our new Australian Research Council funded project — 'Governing Immersive Technology' — what we need now is evidence-based policy for the responsible development of immersive technologies, anticipating risks, preventing harm and supporting inclusive, ethical innovation.
As Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth put it on X: 'The computing platform of the future will be built on AI and AR.' The question now is, whose future, and at what cost?
Ben Egliston is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney and an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow.
Marcus Carter is Professor in Human–Computer Interaction at the University of Sydney and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow.
They are the authors of Fantasies of Virtual Reality: Untangling Fiction, Fact, and Threat.