Finger Food Studios Feeding Future of Tech

Somewhere around the eight to nine years ago mark, I sat across the table from a stand-up gentlemen at a Tim Horton’s while he awed me with his vision for creating tactile environments for not only entertainment development, but education.

Now, Finger Food Studios is setting the standard for community development. Recently, they have donated a massive amount of their designed Sphero application/robots to schools in the Coquitlam School District.

With that donation, they’ve worked tirelessly to develop a code carriculum for a younger audience, and currently have 15,000 kids in Elementary School building a base understanding of code in both a practical sense (with the robots) and in gamification.

“Look at that…” Ryan Peterson, CEO of Finger Food Studios says to me, showing off a video he took on his phone of a group of kids at the #MadeInBC during their classroom session. “They are communicating, and they’re problem solving. Together. As a unit. It brings a tear to your eye.”

Finger Food plans to take the program province-wide, in the coming years.

At their Coquitlam, BC studio, Finger Food is still hard at work continuing to develop their education program, but they’re also on the cutting edge of today’s world.

Partnering with Microsoft, the folks at Finger Food are working closely on multiple projects (most witheld from me at the time of writing this) using the fantastic new Microsoft Hololens platform.

“You put it on and you’re there,” exclaimed Peterson about the experience.

Yet to have the pleasure of a Hololens demo, I heard the praise, and the adoration pour out of the CEO with slight trepidation. I like VR. I can see the adaptive nature of the space as an entertainment platform fitting into a future where TV manufacturers are royally screwed. So I got hyped, but remained reserved.

That was, until I put it on. The demo — showcasing a few “lounge” games — sprung to life in the world around me. No longer was I just on the convention show floor, but infront of me things were living. Superimpossed on the world around me, another world exsists.

The controls, as I played darts, were simple and easy. The biggest difference — and a selling feature that may have sold me — is the attachment to the real world. Many VR experiences are “immersive”, and that’s not to say Hololens isn’t, it’s just not another place. You’re not going to easily run into things/people, as you still have full vision of your surroundings.

All in all, the short Hololens has stired an excitement in me, and you can be sure I’ll be reaching out to Finger Food Studios to get a peek inside their space.

Finger Food is doing big things, in a world that scales with expertise. They’re on the frontlines in a cutting edge scene, and they’re planting seeds in our youth to ensure our province has the brightest future possible.