Orta Interactive | AR Storytelling Experience
Little Pizzeria
Little Pizzeria is a charming AR app created by Orta Interactive Studio that encourages movement, reading aloud, and interactive play. Kids play along with their new friend Sally as together they enlist the help of famed local chef Pizza Perry to make the tastiest pizza possible. Pizza Perry proclaims that the best flavors come from the freshest ingredients and teaches everyone how to grow tomatoes from seeds and turn them into a delicious pizza sauce. Kids follow the story via reading prompts and interactive moments, such as helping to dig holes for the seeds and choosing ingredients for the final pizza, all leading up to a surprise ending to celebrate the fun and learning.
As creative director, I led the storytelling and overall vision for the experience, shaping how the narrative, characters, and interactive moments came together to create something both fun and educational for young players.
From Concept to AR
Before anything came to life in AR, every character and object started as a concept. We developed 3D mockups of Sally, Pizza Perry, and the pizzeria environment to establish the look and feel of the experience early on. The art direction aimed for a warm, playful style with soft shapes and bright colors that would appeal to young children while remaining readable at the small scale of AR objects placed in a real room. These mockups became a shared reference for the whole team, guiding everything from character animations to the layout of interactive moments.
Designing for Young Readers
One of our challenges was meeting the reading and engagement level of children in the target age range of 6 to 10. After consulting with educational researchers and parents of children in this age range, we made sure to keep our interactive reading prompts short and simple, sticking to high-frequency words and basic grammar that this age range is most likely to have encountered. The effect is a higher engagement level, with the side bonus of working better with the voice recognition implementation.
Lessons Learned
Once we had a working script, it was necessary to make modifications as we began to integrate the storyline into the AR environment. Some interactive moments needed to be changed to accommodate the overall scale of the AR objects. For example, the child was originally meant to chop the tomatoes for the sauce; however, the tomatoes were too small to create a meaningful interaction, so this was changed to the child transferring tomatoes to a pot.
Other edits included cutting some dialogue to keep the game on the shorter side and changing the surprise party ending from a large family group to a smaller set of friends and animals due to limited space in which to place the animations.
