Welcome to the Tech Mem Ride Home for Thursday, April 1st, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today.

Microsoft's big halo lens deal with the Pentagon is maybe the big bang for the augmented reality

industry.

Amazon says their folks can come back to work soon and in fact they prefer if they did.

Barish signs for the work remotely movement?

Why these are boom times for chip makers and why series new voices think of gender as a spectrum.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

Big news for the augmented reality industry. Maybe the biggest news in the history of this nascent industry.

The US military says Microsoft will build 120,000 custom hollow lens

headsets for the US Army. Validation of the use case for AR in some very serious real world conditions, yes.

But also look at how much this validates the HoloLens as a business.

Microsoft says the contract could be worth up to $.88 billion dollars over 10 years.

Think of all those years and billions of dollars spent on moonshots over at Google and in one fell swoop.

Microsoft has been like, yeah, hold our beer.

As Brad Sam's tweeted, and just like that,

the R&D costs for this product have been more than recovered, end quote.

And something tells me if these things prove useful,

we could eventually see way more than 120,000 units

ordered, quoting CMBC.

This deal follows a $480 million contract Microsoft received to give the Army prototypes of the integrated

visual augmented system or IVAS in 2018.

The new deal will involve providing production versions.

...