Eyes on history

TUCKED AWAY IN AN OFFICE ON A QUIET LOS ANGELES street, past hallways chockablock with miniature props and movie posters, is a cavernous motion-capture studio. And in that studio is the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in 1963, on the day Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Or rather, it was inside that room that the visual-effects studio Digital Domain captured the expressions, movements and spirit of King, so that he could appear digitally in a virtual reality experience that TIME has produced in partnership with the civil rights leader’s estate. The experience, which is executive-produced and narrated by actor Viola Davis, draws on more than a decade of research