Insight
This recently released charming AR app “Little Pizzeria” was created by Orta Interactive Studio, encouraging 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. Their new friend 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 play along in 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.
The Challenge
One of our challenges was meeting the reading and engagement level of children in the target age range of 6 to 10. After consultation with educational researchers and parents of such aged children, we made sure to keep our interactive reading prompts short and simple, meaning we stuck 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 story line into the AR environment. Some interactive moments needed to be changed to accommodate the overall scale of the AR objects. For example, the child originally was meant to chop the tomatoes for the sauce; however, the tomatoes were too small to create a meaningful interaction, and so this was changed to the child transferring tomatoes to a pot.
Other such edits include cutting some dialogue to keep the game on the shorter side and changing the surprise party ending characters from a large family group to a smaller set of friends and animals due to limited space in which to place the animations
