The U.S. Army is creating augmented reality sunglasses with night vision, GPS and computer capabilities for soldiers, said Gen. John M. Murray, head of the U.S. Army Futures Command Center, based in Austin.

It’s on the path in the next couple of years to put the capability of night vision goggles into a pair of Oakley sunglasses, Murray said. It’s been working with the gaming industry to develop them, he said.

The glasses will also be used in training exercises, Murray said. The Army can send various training scenarios to soldiers using the computer embedded into the glasses to prepare soldiers for combat before they go into a real battle.

That’s just one of the innovations spinning out of the new U.S. Army Futures Command Center that is based at the University of Texas at Austin with a satellite office at Capital Factory, which is a technology accelerator with 60,000 square feet in the Omni building in downtown Austin.

Murray spoke in a fireside chat with Capital Factory Founder and CEO Joshua Baer on Monday night as the official kickoff to the Austin Startup Week. The Army Futures Command Center is the title sponsor of the event this year.

The U.S. Army Futures Command Center officially opened in late August in Austin and serves as the hub of innovation for the military. The center plans to work with entrepreneurs and companies to create new products and solutions for soldiers and the Army.

The U.S. Army Futures Command Center being in Austin is orders of magnitude larger in scale than anything that has preceded it, said Baer. Earlier this year, the U.S. Air Force established AFWERKS at Capital Factory. And in 2016, the Department of Defense established the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental or DIUx at Capital Factory. It has similar offices in Silicon Valley and Boston. The DIUx works with Austin entrepreneurs to create cutting-edge technology for military applications.

But the U.S. Army Futures Command Center is even bigger, Baer said. It will have 500 people based in downtown Austin. It also controls the largest research and development budget of the military.

Four-star general Gen. Murray most recently served as deputy chief of staff at Army Headquarters in Washington, D.C. He is in the process of moving to Austin.

Murray said he had attended the “A Hack of the Drones” hackathon at Capital Factory last weekend and was impressed with the projects they created.

Baer mentioned all the opportunities for collaboration between startups and the military. Already, Senseye, an Austin-based startup, is working with the U.S. Air Force to train fighter pilots. And New Knowledge is using artificial intelligence to identify fake social media posts and fake news and information, Baer said. Also, Apptronik, a robotics spin out of UT Austin, has developed a full robotic exoskeleton that performs superhuman tasks, Baer said. Those are just a few of the startups already collaborating with the military, he said.

There will be lots of opportunities to work together, Gen. Murray said.

“This is completely different from anything I’ve done for the last 36 years,” he said. “The Army is interested in doing things differently than we’ve done for the last 246 years.”

The U.S. Army is looking for a different way of acquiring things, he said.

But it’s not just about things, it’s about how the military will fight in the future, Murray said.

The U.S. Army is seeking to change its organizational structure, he said.

The goal is to figure out how to augment what the Army’s already doing with innovative technologies to provide the very best technology to soldiers in the field, Murray said. He said he has two granddaughters and when his three-year-old granddaughter is an Airborne Ranger Infantry company commander, he wants her to have the very best equipment this country can provide.

The U.S. Army Futures Command will focus on the Army’s six modernization priorities. Those include “long-range precision fires, a next-generation combat vehicle, future vertical lift platforms, a mobile and expeditionary Army network, air and missile defense capabilities and Soldier lethality,” according to the U.S. Army.

The U.S. Army Futures Command Center is interested in technologies that enable those things like communications, machine learning, artificial intelligence, Murray said.

“One of the things that is clear as you look towards the future is the flow of information is going to get faster and denser as this goes,” Murray said. “And so cognitive aid for decision making for commanders.”

“And really the thing that I want to get out of this you are going to expose us to things we would never, ever see in one of our labs or one of our engineering systems,” Murray said. “Because we are not trained to think like this. We have a very risk-averse system. That has been built up over time.”

Robert McNamara designed the system in the 1950s for the military to acquire things, Murray said. Every time someone made a mistake between the 1950s and now someone got punished and another regulation got put on top of it, he said.

The center is looking for ways to help people who are not familiar with the military with how things get done. The center can help entrepreneurs to be successful. It also invests in promising startups at the earliest stages, Murray said.

“I’m perfectly ok with 80 percent market share being on the commercial side,” Murray said. “That will bring people to the table that otherwise would not be interested.”

The investment in technology is about preventing war, Murray said.

“The one way to guarantee that the U.S. will fight another major war is to show weakness,” he said. “This is all about showing strength. Our soldiers deserve to be equipped with the best equipment.”