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When we stepped out of an Uber at Culver City Studios in Los Angeles, the place where cultural touchstones such as “Citizen Kane,” “Beetlejuice” and “The Matrix” were filmed, it was still early enough to be dark outside. The eerie quiet of the place at that hour had us half expecting to see the ghosts of Hollywood crews still zooming between sound stages. Or at least a Pepper’s ghost.

Image Culver City Studios at dawn. Credit... Graham Roberts/The New York Times

We were here, after all, to create our first holographic video recording. (It was the next evolution of our augmented reality app feature, which was introduced in February with “Four of the Best Olympians, as You’ve Never Seen Them,” pegged to the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.)