Meta has dominated online social connections for the past 20 years, but failed to make the smartphones that enabled those connections in the first place. In a multi-year, multi-billion dollar attempt to put itself at the forefront of connected hardware, Meta is now fully focused on computers for your face.

At its annual Connect developer event today in Menlo Park, California, Meta showed off its new, cheaper Oculus Quest 3S virtual reality headset and its improved, AI-powered Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. But the star was Orion, a prototype holographic display glasses that CEO Mark Zuckerberg said has been in the works for 10 years.

Zuckerberg stressed that the Orion glasses – which are currently only available to developers – are not a typical smart display. And he argued that this type of glasses will be so interactive that they will displace the smartphone in many areas.

“Building this display is unlike any other screen you’ve ever used,” Zuckerberg said on stage at Meta Connect. Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, had previously called this technology “the most advanced thing we’ve ever done as a species.”

The Orion glasses, like many other heads-up displays, look like the fever dream of techno-utopians who have been toiling for several years at a top-secret place called the “Reality Lab.” A WIRED reporter noted that the thick black glasses look “clunky” on Zuckerberg.

During the stage demo, Zuckerberg showed how Orion glasses can be used to project multiple virtual displays in front of a person, quickly respond to messages, video chat with someone, and play games. In the messaging example, Zuckerberg noted that users don’t even need to take out their phone. They navigate these interfaces by tapping their fingers together or simply looking at virtual objects.

It will also incorporate a “neural interface” that can interpret brain signals, using a wrist-worn device that Meta first unveiled three years ago. Zuckerberg did not elaborate on how it will actually work or when a consumer version might be released. (Nor did he address the various privacy issues that arise when this machine and its visual AI are connected to one of the world’s largest repositories of personal data.)

He said, however, that the images that appear through the Orion glasses are not pass-through technology – where external cameras show the wearer the real world – nor are they a display or screen that shows the virtual world. It’s a “new kind of display architecture,” he said, where projectors in the arms of the glasses shoot waveguides into the lenses, which then reflect light into the wearer’s eyes, creating volumetric images in front of the wearer. Meta developed this technology itself, he said.

The idea is that instead of the images appearing before your eyes as flat 2D graphics, the virtual images now have shape and depth. “The big innovation with Orion is the field of view,” says Anshel Sag, senior analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, who was present at Meta Connect. “The field of view is 72 degrees, which makes it much more engaging and useful for most applications, whether it’s gaming, social media or just content consumption. Most headsets are in the 30 to 50 degree range.”