Microsoft, US Army join hands for 120,000 AR headsets deal

San Francisco, April 1 (IANS) Tech giant Microsoft has announced that it has received a contract to outfit the US Army to produce 120,000 augmented reality (AR) headsets based on the company’s HoloLens tech.The US Army, this week, said that it will work with Microsoft on the production phase of the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) programme as it moves from rapid prototyping to production and rapid fielding.”We appreciate the partnership with the US Army, and are thankful for their continued trust in transitioning IVAS from rapid prototyping to rapid fielding,” Alex Kipman – Microsoft Technical Fellow said in a blogpost on Wednesday. “We look forward to building on this successful partnership with the men and women of the US Army Close Combat Force,” Kipman added.The IVAS headset, based on HoloLens and augmented by Microsoft Azure cloud services, delivers a platform that will keep Soldiers safer and make them more effective, according to the company.The programme delivers enhanced situational awareness, enabling information sharing and decision-making in a variety of scenarios.According to a TechCrunch report, this contract could be worth as much as $21.88 billion over 10 years.The contract builds on the two-year $480 million contract that Microsoft won back in 2018 to outfit the US Army with augmented reality tech, the report said. At the time, the contract detailed that the deal could potentially result in follow-on orders of more than 100,000 headsets, it added. –IANSvc/ash