Orta Interactive Studio

10/11/2022

Congrats to our team for completing our latest release, Sweet Sorrow, a Shakespearean acting experience in Virtual Reality, available now for free on Sidequest in your Oculus headset!

08/26/2022

Exciting moments in turning motion into meaning! Here's a side-by-side of our mo-cap process alongside the 3D animation result. It's a pretty fabulous outcome that makes our Shakespeare-VR experience really pop! Get ready to perform as Romeo or Juliet, because "Sweet Sorrow" is nearly complete!
Shakespeare VR

08/01/2022

Orta Interactive is proud to announce that we have officially released our first Augmented Reality experience, Little Pizzeria! This game for 1st-6th graders teaches kids where food comes from by interactively growing tomatoes for pizza in a cute animated world. Available free on the Apple Store for all iPhones and iPads, download it today! 🤩
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/little-pizzeria/id1533706125

07/06/2022

We recently had the awesome chance to chat with the AwesomeCast podcast about our recent AR app release, Little Pizzeria! As a feature on their 600th (!) episode, Jaehee Cho and Erika June Christina Laing discussed the rewards and challenges of making this cute interactive AR experience for kids, as well as touched on the wide variety of VR experiences Orta has produced. Check out the podcast here: https://www.sorgatronmedia.com/blog/awesomecast-600-little-pizzeria-ar

06/29/2022

Here's our first pass sketches of Romeo and Juliet, crafted by our summer intern Anlan Yang - aren't they adorable?! These will become 3-D models, rigged with an internal skeleton, and mapped onto motion capture of real actors performing the scenes. Just one of the many steps towards bringing Shakespeare-VR to life!

06/15/2022

Help us welcome our fabulous summer interns, Bokang Wang and Anlan Yang! We have them assisting us with our summer project, Shakespeare-VR, wherein Bokang is hard at work building motion capture and VR interfaces, and Anlan is applying her skills as an artist to breathe life into the characters - Romeo and Juliet, of course! Both are students from CMU's Entertainment Technology Center(ETC), and our goal is to provide them with an excellent hands-on experience that accentuates their degree coursework. Welcome Bokang and Anlan!

06/07/2022

“Wow this is so cool!” We play-tested our Little Pizzeria AR App with some young friends recently and they had a blast! Included in their commentary: cute graphics, fun story, and pretty music. Oh, and of course, the AR interactions were super fun! We’re excited to share Little Pizzeria with the world very soon – to be available for iPhones and iPads everywhere!

05/31/2022

Here we are having fun while testing out a cool technique called Volumetric Capture. This is a spatial recording method that allows us to create three-dimensional hologram-like models, bringing extra life to augmented and virtual reality (XR) and even traditional applications.

In this clip we apply particle settings to video data of live musical saw playing, but soon we plan to utilize this fantastic technique to further immerse viewers in our upcoming release, We Belong Here, a short VR experience exploring the current state of anti-asian hate crime.

01/12/2022

We are very happy to announce that our virtual reality project, Shakespeare-VR, has won a $100,000 Prototyping Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities!

This virtual reality experience we plan to develop will allow users to explore Shakespeare’s plays from the point of view of a performer. Shout out to our project director & collaborator Stephen Wittek! 👏

https://www.neh.gov/news/neh-announces-247-million-208-humanities-projects-nationwide?fbclid=IwAR0zF-_tTpT1Nt78YHMuo5lERxQT-knwk645156DBIlk9p8NObTthPbX89E

Press Release NEH Announces $24.7 Million for 208 Humanities Projects Nationwide Grant awards support humanities initiatives at college campuses, innovative digital resources, conservation, research, and infrastructure projects at cultural institutions. TwitterFacebook Washington, DC (January 11, 20...

09/01/2021

VDEP is the Virtual Dance Exchange Program that allows us to bring the beauty of exquisite choreography into a 360-degree experience of music and movement. We can’t wait to share the final products with you on October 1st!

Shana Simmons Dance announce an award from the Arts Equity Reimagined Fund for The Virtual Dance Exchange Project (VDEP), a collaboration between SSD, Chrisala Brown in Pittsburgh, Bianca Johnson & Dancers (BJD) in New York City, and XRconnectED in Pittsburgh.

04/20/2021

An image from our Auschwitz VR exhibit developed in partnership with the Mania Nudel Holocaust Learning Center in South Florida, where the installation will be available for visitors to immerse themselves in the realities of one of history's deadliest concentration camps.

04/08/2021

Little Pizzeria can be played anytime, anywhere, thanks to the incorporation of Augmented Reality technology that enables sunny tomato growing conditions even in the comfort of your living room.

03/02/2021

Happy to share a sneak peek of our first AR educational game Little Pizzeria! We believe AR has the potential to become powerful tool for immersive learning!

03/01/2021