US blocks $400m Army HoloLens orders, Microsoft left with a tenth for R&D

Congress is putting its foot down on funding the US Army's experiments with Microsoft HoloLens headsets, eliminating program funding in fiscal year 2023 for all but research into newer, less nauseating hardware. The Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) is a HoloLens-derived piece of military augmented-reality equipment …

[Fruit and Nutcase]

1.3

building a better headset, specifically version 1.2.

If I were Uncle Sam, I'd wait for 1.3, or better still, 3.11 for Workgroups[Battlegroups]

[sreynolds]

Re: 1.3

Or the Next Generation version built by IBM but whose IP is taken over by MS by some contract dispute.

[amanfromMars 1]

Telling questions offering unpleasant not incorrect answers?

Hmmm? A piece of kit [Hololens] bristling with sensitive electronic components at a cost of approx.$58,000 apiece for a grunt to wear in the chaos of a barbaric battlefield in vital need of constant stable broadbandwidth radio connection and for a Department for Defense in a foreign war zone where it introducing the natives to the captivating wonders of modern fiat slave capitalism is struggling to make its mark in the consumer market place, public or private ? Hmmm? I wonder why that would be the case?

Do the markets not want New World Order Provision by Postmodern Fascist Machismo? Do Future Builder Planners know?

[CrazyOldCatMan]

A quote from Heinlein comes to mind..

About a Starship Trooper being brained by a cavemn with a club because the ST is too busy trying to read a display in his helmet to notice what's going on around him..

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a great example of Microsoft's amazing sales organization, possibly the best in the world at convincing the right higher ups to purchase partially or completely useless nonfunctional product over the actual users' complaints. I've been forced to use azure edge the last year and God I hate it. It's a cheap knock off of other cloud products, more expensive in the long run, and constantly has issues because they're still working the bugs out. And the engineers on it are worse than useless. "Just restart it" is a pretty common response. I have a friend who worked in defense who said the Navy (at the time, to don't know if it's still true) used to have sailors whose entire job was preventative daily reboots of Windows systems. I can only imagine how pissed off the people just below the top brass must have been to get Congress involved in postponing this waste of taxes.

[PAD67]

Alternative solution

My company Psion Vision Ltd has developed the only alternative solution to Holo-lens system. It's ready to go and is being trialled by the UK military.

Does anyone have a contact in the Us military, congress or the author of the article so I can let them know there is a credible alternative that does not suffer from any of the issues the US army have complained about? It's also much cheaper!