Before famed British broadcaster Sir David Attenborough ventured across the Atlantic to star in his first virtual reality film last year, an advance team took the trip with a key prop: a handful of Attenborough’s signature pale blue shirts.

The shirts had to be tested because Attenborough wasn’t just visiting a regular VR film set. Instead, he was being filmed at Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Capture studio, housed on the company’s Redmond campus. It’s a specialized studio dedicated to volumetric capture, capable of recording people in full 3D, ready to be turned into holograms.

Microsoft has been working on this technology for close to eight years, and recently opened another such studio in San Francisco. The company has ambitious plans to license its technology to a variety of operators — collaborations that could perhaps one day result in futuristic photo booths, capable of turning anyone into a hologram for a few bucks.