In order to block out a scene, the filmmakers would put on their headsets and figure out exactly where the cameras and lights would go to best capture the action, using handheld controllers to move the virtual equipment around like chess pieces. Then, real-world camera operators in the real-world volume would “shoot” the virtual environment by moving their tracked real-world viewfinders around—movements which were mirrored by the virtual cameras in the virtual environment. Two layers of reality, meatspace motions capturing digital dailies.

A decade ago, James Cameron’s Avatar pioneered a technique in which actors wearing motion-capture suits could be filmed inside digital backgrounds in real time. Later, on films like Ready Player One and Solo: A Star Wars Story, filmmakers started using VR headsets to examine the virtual world and even plan shots. What Jon Favreau has cooked up for The Lion King transforms VR from a handy filmmaking accessory into a high-powered, improvisational medium in itself—a Pete Becker–sized leap forward and a stirring reminder that VR is changing the world in ways you don’t need a headset to see.

Donald Glover records one of Simba’s songs. Seth Rogen gives life to Pumbaa, Simba’s farting, singing warthog friend.

The year the original Lion King came out, Hollywood writers were in the grip of VR fever. Michael Crichton had just published his erotic corporate-sabotage thriller Disclosure, in which data gets visualized in a virtual world; soon after, the novel was made into a movie starring Michael Douglas and Demi Moore. (If you think that’s the most ’90s sentence possible, you’re almost correct.) Johnny Mnemonic and Strange Days, two cyberpunk films that made VR a significant part of their imagined futures, were both in production. Even the NBC sitcom Mad About You had an episode in which its lead characters toyed with investing in a VR startup, ultimately putting on headsets for virtual run-ins with Christie Brinkley and Andre Agassi. (Now that’s the most ’90s sentence possible.)

Still, for all the psychedelic dreams that trickled from science fiction to celluloid, virtual reality couldn’t seem to worm its way into our actual lives. The equipment was heavy and uncomfortable, and it delivered laggy graphics. Besides, something called the internet had gone wide. As abruptly as it had boomed, VR faded, eclipsed by the immediacy and accessibility of the web.

LEARN MORE The WIRED Guide to Virtual Reality

Visibility and viability are very different things, of course. When VR dropped off the cultural radar, it found a second life in the vast market situated next door: industrial application. As the Los Angeles Times wrote in 1995, “The technology is starting to find an important place in real estate, construction, medicine and many other realms.” Pop culture had made the public think of VR as an entertainment medium, but that limited view effectively turned the technology into an iceberg, the paltry tip of which bore little resemblance to the enormity of what lurked beneath popular awareness.

A decade or so later, the smartphone came along, spawning an industry of miniaturized displays and sensors that facilitated VR’s 21st-century rebirth. Companies like Oculus realized that consumer VR hardware was finally viable, and the public began to reimagine the realm of virtual possibility—one that included a new approach to filmmaking. With 360-degree video placing viewers inside the movie, some predicted that “VR cinema” would be so transformative that audiences might never again be satisfied with watching a flat theater screen. Alas, a century of filmmaking conventions wasn’t undone so easily. When VR cinema failed to sweep away standard Hollywood blockbusters, the iceberg effect kicked in again: Guess VR won’t spark a film revolution after all!

The set of The Lion King, though, makes very clear that the VR revolution did happen. It just didn’t look at all like the soothsayers thought it would.

Favreau and crew don headsets and enter the virtual environments of The Lion King.

“You’re here watching us flap our wings,” Favreau says to me with a grin as he prepares for another take. It’s a February afternoon in 2018, nearly a year and a half before The Lion King hits theaters, and we’re standing inside the aforementioned volume, which is itself inside a squat, nondescript facility in LA’s Playa Vista neighborhood. This is where the movie took shape. It’s where the voice actors met to record their scenes, with cameras capturing them so animators could use their expressions and emotions as reference for the animals. It’s where those real cameras then got swapped out for virtual ones, so the crew could shoot the movie. Today is one of the last days of principal photography, and it’s a pivotal one, involving a tense scene between Simba (Glover), Scar (Ejiofor), Sarabi (Alfre Woodard), and a group of hyenas. Simba has returned to the pride after years away, ready to confront Scar about his role in Mufasa’s death.