Project Hololens' chief inventor, Alex Kipman, is representative of the Microsoft that Nadella is trying to build. While his official title is technical fellow with the Operating Systems Group, he works collaboratively across disciplines. Nadella appreciates his versatility. “Alex is pretty crazy in the sense that he's not like your classic engineering guy,” he says, drawing a distinction between the predictability of typical engineers and the imaginative quality of their researcher counterparts. “He sort of thinks of engineering as a research project.”

Kipman, who was born in Brazil, started young. His parents had to replace his Atari 2600 twice because he kept breaking it to figure out how it worked. He landed at Microsoft after graduating from Rochester Institute of Technology, and by the end of 2007 he'd dreamed up Kinect, the motion-sensing accessory for the Xbox. “When I pitched Kinect to the company, it wasn't Kinect. It was this vision,” he told me, holding up an early prototype for Project HoloLens. “Kinect was the first step.”

Kipman believes Project HoloLens will be to this phase of computing what the PC was to the last: the latchkey to a completely transformed world. In this new reality, sensors will be everywhere, producing copious amounts of data, a layer of ambient intelligence coating every physical object. Project HoloLens and its counterparts will offer a visual computing platform controlled by speech and gesture that is so intuitive it fades into the background. “So you and I can do what we're put on earth to do: interact with other humans, environments, or objects,” Kipman says. “With technology helping us do that more, better, faster, and cheaper.”

Get More Want more WIRED? Subscribe now to get 6 months for $5

Project HoloLens is built, fittingly enough, around a set of holographic lenses. Each lens has three layers of glass—in blue, green, and red—full of microthin corrugated grooves that diffract light. There are multiple cameras at the front and sides of the device that do everything from head tracking to video capture. And it can see far and wide: The field of view spans 120 degrees by 120 degrees, significantly bigger than that of the Kinect camera. A “light engine” above the lenses projects light into the glasses, where it hits the grating and then volleys between the layers of glass millions of times. That process, along with input from the device's myriad sensors, tricks the eye into perceiving the image as existing in the world beyond the lenses.

The device has just three controls, one to adjust volume, another to adjust the contrast of the hologram, and a power switch. Its speakers rest just above your ears. Project HoloLens can determine the direction from which a sound originates, so that when you hear something, it'll appear to be coming from where it would be in real life. If a truck is meant to be speeding by your left side, for example, that's where you'll hear the sound of its engine. By the time Project HoloLens comes to market toward the end of this year, it'll weigh about 400 grams, or about the same as a high-end bike helmet. Microsoft's new operating system, Windows 10, powers it, so any developer can program for it.

NASA has already gotten an early crack at it. As the mission operations innovation lead at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jeff Norris is charged with rethinking how we explore space, with a focus on the interface between humans and technology. He met Kipman nearly five years ago when he was creating Kinect. In Project HoloLens, Norris saw the potential for technology to help space explorers collaborate more closely and to provide them a quality known as presence. (“People make better decisions when they feel like they're in the environment,” he says.) Last March, Norris and several members of his team relocated from Southern California to Redmond for a few months to build a Mars simulation.