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Dell Innovation Centres are where Dell brings its most important visitors, CEOs, city leaders, and heads of industry, to show them what's possible. My role here is Spatial XR UX Designer hired by Imvizar, their agency partner. I designed a flagship XR experience that walks these C-suite guests through building their own AI Factory on how raw data becomes intelligence, with the models that run on it, the infrastructure that powers it, and the ecosystem that ties it together.
My responsibility is to own the end-to-end spatial UX: spatial information architecture, in-headset UI, and co-located multi-user interaction. built in collaboration with a 3D artist, a narrative artist, and an XR developer. What makes it different from most XR work: it's instructor-led and multi-user (up to three guests in headsets at once), and it's anchored to the physical space: the centres have real hardware on display, including a physical AI server, and the experience connects to that environment instead of floating in a void.
Spatial Design
This isn't a fixed installation only deployed in one centre, it will be deployed across two innovation centres in Limerick , Ireland & Round Rock, Texas, and possibly event floors later. So the layout couldn't be tuned to one room. It had to be designed to respect the space while also making sure we have everything for a good UX for zoning system: experience vs. non-experience walking zones, onboarding → UX → offboarding flow, all set to defined dimensions.
In a headset, your body, your attention, and what you're free to do all become the interface. So before I design anything, I plan the experience one moment at a time. based on my brief on the narratives, for each layer of story , I decide three things: what the person sees, when they see it, and why.
Spatial UX Framework i use :
The first thing to see if the the journey through the room: how someone is drawn in, guided through, and sent off and the most common one is to use the simple five-step model framework museums and exhibitions use to shape a visitor's arc from the doorway to the takeaway.
and then on second layer , because for the Dell AI Factory experience the guests were CEOs, they weren't only there to learn, they were there to be sold to. So each of the five moments had a second job: not just to guide the guest, but to move them toward a decision. So the journey is built around how a decision-maker actually buys: hook the desire, make the value land, kill the risk objection, then hand them the decision so it feels like their own.
Working with Space Blue Print :
The first thing I did was rebuild the blueprint at real 1:1 scale in ShapesXR based on the floor plan we have. Walking the real footprint let me test the zones and clearances with my own body, catch what was too tight or too open, and confirm the sizing was right before a single asset existed. Everything after this, the zoning, the movement path, the pod placement, was built on scale I had already felt, not guessed. It also kept the design honest and reproducible, because it started from the real measurements of the space.
While it looked easy on paper, but every version broke on a real constraint, so we kept redrawing the path until it held. A few things pulled against each other at once. Up to three guests are in headsets at the same time, with an instructor leading. The path had to move them as a group, keep everyone in sightline of the content, and stop them walking into each other. Where one person stands at a point changes where the others can stand. By the time we are designing , the content itself was still being written by Dell and the narrative artist while I designed the flow, so the number and shape of the stops kept moving. Every change to the story meant re-checking the path. So the iterations were not indecision. Each one resolved a specific conflict, until the path could do every job at once: move the group cleanly, keep the story in order, match the real room, and stay reproducible across venues.
The user journey: The 5E set what user sees in the UX
Entice happen at the beginning of when user put on their headset, they willl see the whole map at a glance before deciding which content point they would like to go in.
Enter is the open floor, where the instructor walks the group through the introduction of what user are seeing
Engage is instructor walks the group through the core content experience
Exit and Extend bring them back toward the start for the close and the leave-behind.
Design decision 1: A 2×4 block grid to place an entire AI architecture in a real room
The experience zone is roughly 12 m × 5 m, with 1.5 m walking buffers on the perimeter and an 8 m central corridor for circulation. Rather than eyeball placements, I proposed a 2×4 block system mapped onto the hall, giving every component a consistent, world-anchored home, with directional flow arrows routing guests forward on one side and looping them back on the other. It turned "where does this go?" from a per-asset debate into a repeatable grid, and gave the developer and 3D artist a shared coordinate language for spawning content.
Design decision 2: A POI-based system overview
I proposed an intro sequence that lays out the whole AI architecture as an overview module with a Point-of-Interest (POI) marker on each component This proposal is also to cater the Hook, Grasp, Trust and Value framework into the experience, giving each content point a clear home where its job can play out. Entice happens at the beginning, when the user puts on their headset: they see the whole map at a glance before deciding which content point they would like to go into.
Design decision 3: World-anchored objects, billboarded labels: "the user comes to the content"
An earlier approach arranged content on a 120° arc around the user's camera. With three simultaneous guests there's no single camera to arc around. So I shifted the model: 3D objects stay world-anchored in the centre and people move to them, while only the labels billboard to each guest's view. That's what makes a genuinely shared spatial experience work: everyone sees the same object in the same place and can point at it together.
XR UI UX Design
The experience shipped, and Dell called it the best demo they'd ever seen, which, for a room full of people who are notoriously hard to impress, meant a lot. Here's what I'm taking from it.
Platform learning: Android XR / Unity 6
Things I now know about Android XR / Galaxy XR / Unity 6 that I didn't before, and not many designers have shipped Android XR yet:
- The conventions are still emerging, so on a first build a lot of patterns have to be set, not referenced.
- Instructor/operator UI works best world-locked but repositionable: placed in the room, with the option to move it wherever the instructor needs it. Lifting a flat tablet UI straight into the headset doesn't work: text drifts out of the field of view and buttons read too small. Design it for the headset: world-anchored yet grab-and-move, with chunky targets and a readable text band in natural eye line.
- A bottom progress bar is a useful default pattern: it masks the perceived latency between a control press and the animation starting.
- Native Unity text beats imported image/sprite text for staying crisp at distance.
Discipline learning: Spatial Design vs XR UI/UX
I wore both hats, and the difference became clear in practice:
- Spatial Design = where things sit, scale, comfort zones, room layout, gaze paths.
- XR UI/UX = panels, interactions, flows, hierarchy.
- On Dell AI, spatial design dominated: the room layout was the experience, and the UI served the room rather than the other way around.
Multi-user spatial design
Designing for up to three simultaneous guests is a different craft from solo XR:
- Design for the object in the room, not the camera on one person's face.
- World-anchor the content; billboard only the labels.
- People read a single footprint too literally and crowd one spot: give them a standing zone with multiple markers.
Physical-space anchoring
The experience shares the room with real hardware:
- Content had to coexist with the physical space, not float in a void.
- Anchoring to the room (and connecting to real hardware and display screens at key beats) made it feel like part of the centre, not a demo dropped on top.
What I'd do differently
- Establish a "spatial truth" lock-point earlier in the pipeline, so revisions don't cascade through animation and dev.
- Keep designing for revision-tolerance: the POI overview worked precisely because it absorbed change instead of resisting it.
Thank you for reading ❤️
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