BAE Systems

BAE Systems
Information
Type	Public limited company
Industry	Defence, aerospace, security
Founded	1999
Headquarters	London, United Kingdom
Products	Striker and Striker II helmet-mounted displays, Q-Sight, Q-Warrior, LiteHUD
Website	https://www.baesystems.com

BAE Systems is a British defence, aerospace and security company. It was formed in 1999 when British Aerospace merged with Marconi Electronic Systems, the defence electronics business of The General Electric Company (GEC). Its registered office is at 6 Carlton Gardens in London, and the company says it employs more than 110,000 people in more than 40 countries.

BAE Systems' connection to augmented reality is its work on military see-through displays. It builds the Striker helmet-mounted displays used by Eurofighter Typhoon and Saab Gripen pilots, the Q-Sight family of helmet displays based on holographic waveguides, the Q-Warrior display for dismounted soldiers and the waveguide-based LiteHUD head-up display. According to Octopus Ventures, an investor in the waveguide maker WaveOptics, the three WaveOptics co-founders had earlier developed head-up and head-mounted displays in the defence industry at BAE Systems.

Reviewed 13 October 2026. Checked corporate basics against Companies House and BAE pages, and Q-Sight, Q-Warrior, Striker, Striker II, F-35 alternate helmet, LiteHUD, Project Intuity, VR suite, HoloLens and patent claims against each cited source. About review dates.

History

The company that is now BAE Systems plc was incorporated as British Aerospace Limited on 31 December 1979 and became British Aerospace Public Limited Company at the end of 1981. It traded under that name until 5 May 2000. On 27 April 1999 British Aerospace agreed with GEC to merge GEC's defence electronics business, Marconi Electronic Systems, into the company.

BAE develops its helmet-mounted displays at its Electronic Systems site in Rochester, Kent, which the company says specialises in them. In a 2023 release, BAE said the Rochester site had worked on display technology for more than 60 years and had more than 1,500 employees. In July 2026 the company said it had more than 1,000 helmet-mounted displays in service in ten countries.

Products

Product	Type	First shown or announced	Notes
Q-Sight	Helmet-mounted display	Late 2007	Holographic waveguide display for helicopter crews; first UK order in 2009
LiteHUD	Head-up display	December 2012	Waveguide HUD; first flight on an AC-130J
Q-Warrior	Helmet-mounted display	February 2014 (field tests)	See-through display for soldiers on foot, based on Q-Sight technology
Striker	Helmet-mounted display	In service by 2014	In service on Eurofighter Typhoon and Saab Gripen
Striker II	Helmet-mounted display	July 2014	Digital helmet with integrated night vision; in development for the Typhoon fleet
Project Intuity	Helmet-mounted display demonstrator	July 2026	Testbed for sixth-generation combat aircraft

XR work

Q-Sight holographic waveguide displays

Q-Sight is a line of light, modular helmet-mounted displays that BAE Systems introduced for helicopter pilots in late 2007. Instead of the multiple lenses of a conventional helmet display, Q-Sight uses holographic waveguides to carry the output of an LCD directly to a combining lens about 1/8 inch thick and the size of a credit card. New Atlas compared this with typical helmet displays about 1 to 2 inches thick, and described the four-ounce model as attachable to any helmet and compatible with night-vision goggles. It could be fitted on either side of the helmet to suit the pilot's dominant eye. BAE presented the Q-Sight family of helmet displays and tracking products to US Army aviators at the Army Aviation Association of America conference in April 2008.

Shephard reported that Q-Sight followed about ten years of technology development. The first order came from the UK Ministry of Defence in September 2009: 12 Gunner's Remote Sighting Systems for Royal Navy Lynx Mk8 helicopters, with initial units due at the end of 2009 and all 12 by May 2010. In that system, Q-Sight shows the image from a thermal sight mounted on the machine gun on a see-through display on the gunner's helmet, and the gunner can switch between night-vision goggles and the thermal image.

BAE Systems plc is the assignee of US patent 9,081,178, granted in July 2015, which covers a projection display that injects image-bearing light into a plate-like waveguide. The patent claims priority from 7 September 2005 and lists Michael David Simmonds and Mohamed Salim Valera as inventors.

Q-Warrior

Q-Warrior is a see-through, helmet-mounted head-up display for soldiers on foot. In February 2014 BAE said field testing had begun at its Electronic Systems business in Rochester. It has a high-resolution colour display that overlays symbols and video, such as waypoints and targets, on the wearer's view, and a large eye-motion box so the wearer can move their head and still see the image. Military & Aerospace Electronics reported that it built on technology from the Q-Sight range. BAE listed enhanced night vision, routing information, tracking of personnel and assets, and identification of hostile and friendly forces among its intended functions. The company expected Special Forces and reconnaissance roles such as joint tactical air controllers to be the first users, with initial use at section-commander level.

Striker helmet

Striker is the helmet-mounted display used by Eurofighter Typhoon and Saab Gripen pilots. Aviation International News described it in 2014 as a binocular display that overlays flight parameters, sensor data, weapon status and night vision on the pilot's view, with a high-accuracy, low-latency head tracker that can slave sensors or weapons, so the pilot can aim and cue weapons off boresight. The outer casing carries 64 light-emitting diodes that three cockpit cameras track in real time, an outside-in optical tracking arrangement. The helmet weighed 1.9 kg, or 2.3 kg with night vision, including twin visors and the oxygen mask.

F-35 alternate helmet

After development problems with the Rockwell Collins and Elbit Systems helmet-mounted display system for the Lockheed Martin F-35, the Pentagon chose BAE Systems in September 2011 to develop a more conventional alternate helmet that used night-vision goggles. Lockheed Martin said BAE began the work in September 2011. On 10 October 2013 the F-35 Joint Program Office halted the alternate helmet to concentrate on the Generation 2 helmet, recouping about $45 million set aside for it. Liz Ryan Sax, a spokeswoman for BAE's Electronic Systems unit, said: "We are disappointed at today's decision by Lockheed Martin and the Joint Strike Fighter Joint Program Office to discontinue the pursuit of a second helmet for the F-35 aircraft."

Striker II

BAE launched Striker II at the Farnborough Airshow in July 2014. AIN reported that the company had drawn on its alternate F-35 helmet work to produce it. The launch release described a fully digital, binocular, visor-projected display with a center-mounted ISIE-11 night vision sensor based on Intevac Photonics' electron bombarded active pixel sensor (EBAPS) technology, and hybrid opto-inertial head tracking. BAE said the internal camera removed the need to reconfigure night-vision goggle hardware for day-to-night transitions and that its night vision performance was equal to or better than helmets using goggles. The Aviationist reported in 2024 that the EBAPS night vision sensor was made by EOTech and that 3D audio was an optional feature.

BAE's product page lists a 40-degree field of view and a colour display readable in daylight, with adversaries shown in red and friendly forces in blue. Imagery can appear in a small picture-in-picture window, the helmet can show simulated adversaries for training, and BAE says the digital architecture is meant to support live virtual constructive training and the cueing of collaborative combat aircraft. In September 2023 the UK Ministry of Defence awarded BAE a £40 million contract to develop Striker II for the Royal Air Force's Typhoon fleet. BAE said the helmet projects data onto the visor to give pilots an augmented reality view of the real world, and that qualification and integration flight tests would take place at its Warton site in Lancashire. On 11 December 2024 the four-nation Eurofighter consortium of Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK awarded a further £133 million contract to mature the helmet, alongside flight testing, to a production-ready standard.

LiteHUD

LiteHUD is a cockpit head-up display that uses an optical waveguide in place of conventional HUD optics. BAE announced it in December 2012. At the 2014 Farnborough Airshow, BAE business development director Chris Colson told AIN that waveguide HUDs fit better around the large displays of new cockpits, and said: "In a waveguide display, you don't have to be square-on to the optics to see the symbology." In 2017 BAE said LiteHUD was about 60 percent smaller by volume and up to 50 percent lighter than conventional HUDs. Its first flight was on a US Special Operations Command AC-130J, followed by flights on the Textron Scorpion and BAE's Advanced Hawk demonstrator. The same release said BAE had produced more than 15,000 HUDs for more than 50 aircraft types.

Wearable cockpit and Project Intuity

In 2018, as part of its Tempest combat aircraft concept, BAE described a "wearable cockpit" in which most physical instruments would be replaced by virtual displays projected through the pilot's helmet. Pilots would select items with eye tracking and hand gestures. BAE lead technologist Jean Page called it "a software-only cockpit that's upgradeable, adaptable and reconfigurable."

At the Farnborough International Airshow in July 2026, BAE showed Project Intuity, a helmet-mounted display demonstrator for sixth-generation aircraft such as those in the Global Combat Air Programme. BAE said it had twice the display area of current helmet-mounted displays and quad high-definition resolution. The demonstrator combines head tracking and 3D audio cueing. Eye tracking is not integrated; BAE describes the demonstrator as a platform for maturing display optics and eye tracking. BAE did not give a service timeline.

Virtual reality and mixed reality in engineering

In November 2015 BAE's Naval Ships business said it had opened five virtual reality visualisation suites at its Glasgow, Portsmouth and Bristol sites, installed by the Cheshire company Virtalis. The suites show full-scale 3D ship designs that engineers inspect with a laser tracking system and an interactive wand. BAE used them on the Royal Navy's new Offshore Patrol Vessels and the Type 26 Global Combat Ship.

BAE, which makes electric propulsion systems for HybriDrive buses, worked with PTC to build step-by-step HoloLens training guides for assembling bus batteries with ThingWorx Studio. Microsoft said in April 2018 that BAE could create such guides in a few hours at a tenth of the cost and that new staff trained 30 to 40 percent more efficiently.

See also

• Helmet-mounted display
• Head-up display
• Waveguide display
• WaveOptics
• Enterprise AR