Meow Wolf, the George R.R. Martin-backed immersive experience designer, pushes into XR

It’s been a long time since the original 10 members of Meow Wolf’s art collective had to scrounge in dumpsters for the raw materials to bring their galaxy-spanning visions to life.

Now, with well over $18 million in financing behind them, the story of a troupe of misunderstood, hardscrabble artists trying to create something unique in an unlikely corner of the U.S. has morphed into a vision of corporate aspirations that span the nation — and potentially the globe — with help from some of the largest technology companies in the world, like Microsoft.

As part of its move beyond immersive experiential content into two-dimensional and three-dimensional virtual storytelling, Meow Wolf is now harnessing Microsoft’s volumetric capture technologies to record characters and aspects of its performances and make them digital.

That’ll be important as the company looks to take its show on the road. The company has plans to launch new versions of its shows in Las Vegas, Denver and Washington.

“In terms for this collaboration it’s R&D to be distributed across our network,” says Nicolas Gonda, EVP of Entertainment at Meow Wolf.

For Microsoft, the installation of its volumetric capture technology is the first time that the Seattle company has brought its technology out of its own studios. In the Meow Wolf space at the converted bowling alley George R.R. Martin’s capital helped acquire, Microsoft’s capture technology will be situated in “an area thematically tied in to the Meow Wolf experience,” says Mixed Reality Capture Studios general manager Steve Sullivan.

“Whenever we interact with audiences — whether through location-based entertainment, television shows, feature films, podcasts or any other medium we employ — we treat them as participants within our stories and provide them with agency,” wrote Gonda, in an email.

Through the volumetric capture tech that Microsoft is bringing to the table, Meow Wolf will be looking to capture its characters and performers and bring them into other media. “Volumetric technology gives us the tools to have more characters in the space, and blend physical and digital worlds more seamlessly, in ways that are novel and unexpected. Imagine interacting with a digital character and having the same performer physically step into the space,” Gonda wrote.

“Volumetric video allows us to create extendable layers of experience and performance, with the physical space acting as an anchor for digital content. Volumetric capture sidesteps the uncanny valley and makes it possible to have realistic human characters in XR.”

That means an easy pipeline for bringing Meow Wolf characters into extended reality, mobile devices, digital screens for short-form video content and holograms in spaces that aren’t purpose-built by Meow Wolf to be immersive, according to Gonda.