THE PROBLEM
A product story that no standard retail format could tell well enough.
Google's retail team had a real challenge: Pixel's hardware, camera capabilities, AI features, and ecosystem story are genuinely differentiated, but offline carrier retail is a notoriously passive format. A shopper picks up a handset, taps through a few screens, and puts it down. That interaction rarely communicates the depth of what makes a Pixel device worth choosing. The brief was explicit: design something that would let a customer actually experience the Pixel story, not just browse it. No comparable template existed for this kind of engagement in Singapore's carrier outlet environment.
Spatial computing was a genuinely new discipline in 2023, and that was precisely why it was the right answer.
The original concept was a Meta Quest-based XR experience: a Pixel customer walks into a carrier store, a sales rep hands them a headset, and they enter an immersive environment that walks them through Google's marketing features and device capabilities. This was 2023 to 2024. Apple Vision Pro had not yet launched. Meta Quest was the only mainstream standard for spatial hardware in retail. There were no inherited patterns, no reference stack to follow, and no prior art at the brand scale Google required. Every UI decision had to be re-thought from first principles: spatial layout, hand-tracking interaction, depth, and environmental presence as design variables. We were operating at the frontier of the discipline as we shipped it.
A real-world operational blocker demanded a real-world design response, not a retreat from the brief.
After the XR experience was built, the deployment hit a constraint that no amount of design refinement could solve: hygiene. In a high-traffic retail environment with thousands of customers a day, shared headsets became an operational blocker. The question that emerged was whether the design work would survive the platform change, or whether a pivot to kiosk and tablet hardware would require starting over. It would not. The information architecture, the visual narrative structure, and the product-story experience framework were all platform-agnostic. We carried the entire thesis into the new hardware, added capabilities the headset format could not have served, and shipped a stronger product as a result.
THE DESIGN JOURNEY
We treated the XR brief as a spatial information architecture problem before we treated it as a visual problem.
The foundation of the XR experience was a product narrative arc: Pixel's hardware, its AI features, its camera capabilities, and the broader ecosystem story had to unfold in a sequence that felt natural and intuitive in a headset environment. That meant mapping the experience as a spatial flow before designing any individual scene. Hand-tracking interaction models, depth relationships, and environmental framing all had to serve the narrative rather than demonstrate technology for its own sake. The team also designed the pitch deck and infographics used internally to present the experience to senior Google leadership, which meant the design work had to hold up not only in the headset but in a slide review at the highest level of the organisation.
The pitch process shaped the design as much as the brief did.
Operating inside Google's sales-and-marketing pipeline meant that every design decision went through the full review chain, from the day-to-day team to broader sales leadership. That approval structure forced precision. There was no room for ambiguity in how the Pixel story was framed spatially, how features were sequenced, or how the experience would feel to someone who had never worn a headset in a retail context. The embedded team rhythm, with internal meetings and iteration cycles running in a complete startup cadence inside a Google project, meant that design and review happened continuously rather than in batches. That compression of the loop was a direct advantage when the kiosk pivot came.
The kiosk pivot was not a setback. It was the moment the design discipline proved it had been built correctly.
Moving from Meta Quest to kiosk plus tablet required carrying the same experience architecture into a fundamentally different interaction model. The kiosk surface handled the customer-facing Pixel experience. The tablet surface handled the sales-rep-facing version, which doubled as a training module for new Pixel sales reps, a use case the headset format had never been able to serve. The information architecture that had been built for spatial navigation translated directly into a touch-based format because it had been structured around the product story, not around the hardware. A design system built on product-narrative logic rather than platform-specific metaphors survived the platform change completely.
THE SOLUTION
A kiosk experience that let shoppers engage with the Pixel story on their own terms, without the friction of a headset.
The deployed kiosk experience removed every barrier that the XR format had carried: no headset on and off ritual, no hygiene management overhead, no coordination between customer and sales rep required for the experience to start. A shopper could walk up, begin engaging with the Pixel narrative immediately, and move through the feature story at their own pace. The interaction model was designed for a retail context where attention is partial and time is short, which meant each section of the experience had to deliver value in the first few seconds of engagement, not after a setup sequence.
The tablet surface served two audiences simultaneously, and that dual function was a product decision, not a design compromise.
The sales-rep-facing tablet experience was designed to work as both a guided companion to the kiosk and a standalone training tool for new Pixel representatives. A rep could use it to guide a customer through the Pixel story while referencing the same structured narrative the customer was seeing on the kiosk. Or they could use it independently in a training context to learn the Pixel feature set in the same sequence a customer would experience. That dual-function design was a stronger product outcome than the original XR-only brief would have produced, because the headset format could only serve one audience at a time.
Deployment across 25 carrier outlets produced 7,000-plus shopper engagements in the first month.
The kiosk experience went live at Google Singapore HQ for public testing before carrier-outlet deployment. The results across the 25 outlets in the first month were the clearest possible validation of the pivot decision: a higher engagement volume than the XR experience had produced in its HQ testing phase, in a format that required no operational management from retail staff and no acclimatisation from shoppers. Embedded design accelerating innovation for the Pixel launch cycle is the frame that best captures what the engagement delivered, because the speed of the XR-to-kiosk transition without losing the experience quality was only possible because the design had been built on the right foundation from the start.
THE KEY MOMENT
The pivot was not the crisis. The pivot was the test of whether the design had been done right.
Every product engagement eventually faces a constraint that the original brief did not anticipate. The hygiene blocker on the XR headsets was that constraint for this project. The response to that kind of constraint reveals what a design system actually is at its core. If the experience had been built around the headset as its organizing logic, the pivot to kiosk and tablet would have been a rebuild. Because the experience had been built around the Pixel product story as its organizing logic, the pivot was a translation. The narrative arc, the feature sequence, the information hierarchy, and the visual framing all moved intact from one hardware platform to another. What did not survive was the operational friction of the original format, which was the right thing to lose. The 7,000-plus shopper engagements in the first month were not the result of the kiosk hardware. They were the result of a product-story experience framework that had been designed to be hardware-agnostic from the beginning, even before the team knew it would need to be.
The work, in detail.
The gallery below shows the spatial XR experience concept, the kiosk customer-facing surface, the tablet sales-rep and training module, and the carrier-outlet deployment across the 25-outlet network.
industry:
Consumer, XR
SCOPE:
Product
,
Creatives
duration:
8 Months
key outcome:
7K+
shoppers engaged
