Amore Pizza

The 4th floor of Grady is home to many exciting technologies. There’s innovative website design, a Microsoft HoloLens, voice technology, and over 611 students working to make things better every day. However, something a lot taster has also recently moved into the NMI, a Pizza Parlor. One of our NMI capstone groups spent their semester using ARKit technology to create a competitive and interactive, pizza creating game that brings a life-size pizza parlor to any open space.

Amore Pizza starts with using your iPhone’s camera to scan the surroundings a player wishes to use. After the scan, Player 1 must click the screen to place life-size Pizza Parlor furnishings around the room. These items include a brick pizza oven, pantry shelf with cheese, tomato, and of course pizza dough, a cooktop to prepare all the different ingredients, and finally a window to send out pizza creations into the virtual world. One of the most exciting parts of playing Amore Pizza is the multiplayer capability. ARKit2 allow multiple devices at once to interact with the same AR objects. Multiplayer allows players to compete together against the clock and adds an exciting layer of competition and comradery to the game challenges.

While ARKit technology sounds cool, one might be wondering why this group picked a pizza parlor to invest their semester in. Drawing inspiration from the games their target market, teens and young adults, grew up playing such as Cooking Mama and Sandwich shop games, the creators of Amore Pizza wanted to introduce ARKit2 technology to their new audience using something they already felt comfortable with. Amore Pizza hopes to continue to advance their knowledge of AR to add more levels, challenges, and interactivity in the future. But for right now, they are excited to see how these new AR technologies change the gaming world for the better.