…but before you get excited, we haven’t posted any more episodes, yet. Since we updated the show on both Steam and Oculus, I figured it was as good an excuse as any to let you guys know what we’ve been up to for the last couple of months.

But before we get to that, we’ve been thrilled by your response to the Firewatch episode. You’ve embraced this new medium in a way that we didn’t anticipate, you’ve made us one of the top-rated VR experiences on Steam, and we’re working as fast as we can to get more episodes out to you. We’re on track to deliver new shows later this summer, but those are just the beginning of what we have planned. After we get The FOO Show up and running, we’ll start talking about what the next shows on FOO will be. Yes, FOO is for more than talk shows.

We also realized that we’ve never really explained how FOO works, at least not publicly. The short version is that our software can record and play back performances that we capture using the Vive (Oculus Touch and PSVR should work as well). When we recorded the Firewatch episode, Jake, Sean, and I were all in the same physical space, each wearing our own Vive and each connected to our own PC. Inside the app, our separate virtual realities merged into a single shared experience. After we recorded the performances, we extracted the audio for some light editing, cut the studio interview segment from 12ish minutes to about 3 using our editing tools, and then packaged everything up for distribution via Oculus Home and Steam.

We can record episodes in shared or discrete physical spaces. Image credit: Eric Florenzano

The secret sauce of our software is the animation technology. We can animate a believable human avatar using just the head and hand positions provided by the Vive or Oculus Touch. This means that instead of an expensive motion capture rig, we can capture a performance with hardware that millions of people will have in the next year. Our goal is to make FOO a tool that anyone who wants to make 3D-rendered, interactive VR content without having to understand the dark arts of character rigging, game engine programming, and the like. When we’re done, you’ll be able to buy FOO, add your own art, and start producing and sharing your own shows, without having to hire a bunch of engineers, host servers, and build clients for all the VR platforms.

We’ve done a major overhaul on the way our animation works.

We’ve built a rudimentary version of the toolchain needed to accomplish that, performance capture, editing, and playback are in; however we have a lot more work to do. We’re bringing an avatar creator online shortly that will dramatically accelerate the creation of rigged avatars. Instead of taking an artist a few weeks to build one avatar that’s ready for our mo-cap system, the new system lets an artist build the same avatar in a few days. After that, we need to build out our backend tech to let us distribute episodes without drafting on Steam and Oculus Home, flesh out our editing tools, build out our live broadcast tools (and the infrastructure to support them) and much more. We’re going to be busy for a while.

Bonus points if you can guess who this avatar was created for.

But before we get to that point, we need to produce The FOO Show on the regular. To that end, we’ve spent the last two months working on the behind-the-scenes stuff that will let us both technically and financially produce the show weekly. This first update includes the underpinnings for a lot of that work — we’ve reduced the space each episode needs on disk, we’ve added support for the Oculus Rift to the Steam version of the client, we fixed a handful of bugs that you helped us find, and we’ve started the housekeeping that will let us distribute episodes independently of the client.

If you jump back into the show, the big thing you may notice today is that we’ve done a major overhaul on the way our animation works. That means Jake, Sean, and I animate better now than we did before. That’s right, because the animations happen when you run the episode, old episodes will benefit from future improvements to our tech.

Our arm animation is much more natural than before. No more locked elbows.

We think that FOO represents a massive opportunity to tell incredible stories on virtual reality stages. We’re going to take audiences places that would be impossible in any other medium. We’ve already taken you to one location that doesn’t exist in the real world — the Firewatch watchtower — but with VR that’s just the beginning. With FOO, we can tell the story of mitochondria, where the audience is inside a human cell with an expert, or we can twist your brain by setting a soap opera in a non-Euclidean space. When we say impossible, we really mean impossible.

To that end, we’re looking for a small number of partners who have stories that they want to tell in VR, but who don’t want to build a game development studio to make that happen. If you know anyone who fits that bill, please introduce us. And if you’d like to know more about how FOO works, we’ve posted a deeper dive explaining more about how FOO works and our technology stack. If you want to know more, follow us on Twitter or subscribe to our mailing list.