Designing an Emotionally Impactful VR Training Experience for Amazon Logistics

Project Overview and Objectives

The design of the scenario and structure was led by immersive designer Alex Fletcher. It’s a short-form VR training simulation built to elicit an emotional response and reinforce decision-making accountability under pressure. Developed within a tight three-week window for a conference setting, the goal was to create a compact, high-impact experience that could be delivered reliably across multiple users with minimal onboarding.

The central design challenge lay in simulating a realistic delivery driver scenario that felt grounded, immersive, and emotionally affecting, while also being technically achievable within severe constraints on time, visual fidelity, and user interaction complexity. Further, it needed to function seamlessly in a live, seated context with varying users and headsets, requiring careful consideration of user orientation, accessibility, and pacing.

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Prototyping Workflow Using ShapesXR

To move quickly from concept to implementation, instead of relying on traditional 2D storyboards or slide decks, Alex and co-designer Jack Carrington used ShapesXR as a core tool in the early design and communication phases of the project, to ideate everything from scratch. 

The design started with a rough block out of the street scene using primitives to sketch the road layout and the included assets within the ShapesXR library. This allowed the team to get immersed in an environment that was accurately scaled and allowed to proceed with 2 other important elements in the prototype: the storyboard and the UI/interaction design.

Alex and Jack took advantage of the ShapesXR scene system to highlight key story moments in succession, which allowed him to communicate effectively the scope of the project and adjust the flow based on iterative design reviews with team members.

ShapesXR also played an important role when positioning the UI spatially within the scene. This included standard 2D UI to calibrate the user hight to ques to help the user in the story progression like answering a phone call, turning on the car engine or a gaze interaction to look at the back mirror

This VR-native prototyping approach was crucial in aligning the team and validating user flow logic well before moving into engine-level development.

Final Outcomes and Conclusion

Working under intense time pressure, Alex and Jack designed this emotionally charged VR demo in just three days, using ShapesXR to rapidly prototype scene logic, visual pacing, and interaction points. Built as a conference deliverable, the team had to move fast and design with precision,  balancing emotional impact with development feasibility.

The experience was built around a central theme: that the user should feel complicit in an event they ultimately can’t control. Using ShapesXR from the very start, the team was able to spatially block out the full setup (testing road layout, vehicle placement, sightlines, and environmental occlusion) while also simulating key emotional beats.

The result was a production-ready prototype that enabled fast, focused development.

The impact was two fold:

• Design validation: The demo demonstrated how emotionally-driven scenarios can be created efficiently even on tight deadlines, especially when early-stage ideation happens within VR.
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• Operational relevance: it gave Amazon stakeholders an embodied, visceral representation of real-world risks and distractions, conveying the stakes of rushed decision-making in a way that traditional formats struggle to achieve.

Crucially, ShapesXR enabled real-time collaboration and spatial thinking from day one. It allowed the team to explore, communicate, and test interaction timing and environment design directly in context, accelerating the process without compromising on the final deliverable.

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