A Bank's Own VR Classroom
An immersive AR/VR training experience for SBI's institute. I was the sole UX & screen designer on a team of 3D builders, responsible for how a first-time visitor moves through, looks at, and interacts with an entire spatial environment. I owned the lobby's full navigation and wayfinding system, and extended that ownership to every screen a visitor could stop and read: the wall displays, the training room's entire content experience from top-level categories down to the player itself. If it appeared on a screen in that space, I designed it; the environment and props were the build team's domain.
State Bank Institute of Technology02 — CONTEXT
One lobby, three ways in
The institute needed an on-site VR experience: a lobby that orients a first-time visitor and routes them into three separate experiences (a branch walkthrough, a training center, and a 360° campus tour), plus two wall screens telling the institute's own history and explaining the AR/VR technology it was built with. The team building it was 3D-first. The developers were assembling pre-built components, and I was the only person designing screens and flow for people wearing a headset, not looking at a monitor.
03 — PROBLEM
“Not VR-friendly,” every time
The same note came back on every screen I designed, worded differently each time: not VR-friendly. A flat, monitor-shaped UI floating in a headset doesn't behave like one on a screen: peripheral content gets lost, and a user can't hold focus on something off to the side while doing anything else.
04 — PROCESS
One flow, three rebuilds
One lobby, three ways in
Before any screen got designed, the lobby had to answer a wayfinding question: how does someone entering blind (no menu, no monitor, just a headset) find their way into branch, training center, or campus tour without getting lost or overwhelmed?
- Welcome tutorial is skippable, so repeat visitors aren't punished.
- All three rooms converge into one shared exit pattern: return to lobby / enter next room, regardless of which portal they came from, keeping the mental model consistent.
- Fade / transition / teleport as a deliberate buffer: between “choosing” and “arriving,” so orientation doesn't break.
Timeline wall: designing for a number that would change
Designed for a fixed 1680×720 display. Then the client doubled the milestone count and added photos to each one. The layout had no more room to give. Since the screen size couldn't change, I rebuilt it as a scrolling strip with a continuous centerline running edge-to-edge, trading a fixed frame for one that grows.
AR/VR heritage: when the brief's structure was the problem
The client's brief: five topics, five cards. v1 followed it literally, and came out flat. Feedback cut two sections outright, called the rest generic.
Instead of patching what remained, I dropped the brief's list order and grouped by relationship: a hub-and-spoke diagram for how XR/AR/VR/MR connect, a photo timeline for history, and an expanded insights panel in the space the cuts freed up.
Training room screen: three passes to get rid of the TV
The wall-mounted screen kept feeling like a TV bolted into a VR room. Three iterations, each removing a bit more of the “TV” until the room itself became the interface.
A second, quieter decision ran alongside that one: whether the room stayed on-brand or went its own way. It didn't resolve until v3.
A menu panel sits beside the wall screen. To pick something, you look left; to watch it, you look back to center.
Constant focus-switching, no real reason for it to exist in VR.
The panel moves onto the screen: menu appears while choosing, then clears to just playback controls. PM signed off — client didn't.
Still just a TV. No interaction, nothing library-like, no real UI layer.
The screen is gone. Four banners on the wall, styled to match the room instead of SBI blue. Pick one, then a subcategory, and a screen appears wherever you're facing, then holds position while it plays.
I wasn't deciding the room itself: the sofa, wall color, the books on the shelf. Where the build team needed a design opinion on top of that, I gave it.
05 — SOLUTION
What shipped
06 — OUTCOME
No usage metric: just three rounds survived
No usage number here. It's an internal tool.
The client only saw it on video until QA demoed in person in Hyderabad. A post-departure voiceover change and rename (SBIIT → SBIT) touched only the 360° tour. Nothing I'd designed.
07 — REFLECTION
What this project actually tested
Every argument was about attention, not aesthetics
Being the only screen designer on a 3D-led team meant asking one question three different ways: where is this person looking, and what happens to everything they're not?
Attention has to compete
A monitor holds still. A headset doesn't — the room stays visible around whatever you're focused on.
Knowing which arguments are real
What I'd trust myself on next isn't a UI pattern. It's knowing which arguments are really about that competition — and which ones are just taste.
