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Unreal Warehouse
Bremen · EITIE lab · Octalysis gamification studyA picking floor we can rebuild every morning.
Unreal Warehouse is a full-scale warehouse floor rebuilt inside Unreal Engine, so we can hand the same order-picking task to a dozen different game designs before any of them touch a real shift.
What we're building
The floor
A warehouse rebuilt in Unreal Engine — racks, picking lists, travel paths — so a scenario can be run end to end before it ever reaches a real shift.
The scenarios
Octalysis-scored gamification elements — points, missions, leaderboards, timers — built around the picker's actual workflow, not bolted on afterwards.
The measurement
Every simulated shift logs to a database alongside the KPIs order-picking research already tracks: travel time, distance, waiting time, picking errors. EEG is next, once a scenario earns it.
How the research runs
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01
Score the scenario
Candidate scenarios are scored against Octalysis's eight core drives and filtered with multi-criteria decision methods — before anyone spends time building one.
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02
Build it in Unreal Warehouse
Scenarios that survive scoring get built onto the same simulated floor, so every one is compared under identical conditions.
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03
Run it and measure
Simulated pickers work the floor. Real-world KPIs — and eventually EEG readings — show what the scenario actually changed, not just what it was designed to change.
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04
Fine-tune and repeat
Results feed back into the scenario design. The cycle runs again until one is ready to leave the simulator for a real warehouse floor.
Team
Advisor
Constructor UniversityProf. Dr. Omid Fatahi Valilai
Professor of Industrial Engineering at Constructor University Bremen, leading the Emerging Technologies in Industrial Engineering (EITIE) group. Advises this project, along with a wider group of PhD and Master's theses across supply chain, cloud manufacturing and circularity research — including Sasan's own thesis listing.
The proposal
The project behind Unreal Warehouse is a PhD proposal in International Logistics: Gamification applications in a warehouse order picking system using Octalysis method. It starts from a simple industry problem — order picking has some of the highest staff turnover in warehousing — and asks whether a well-designed game changes that, and how to tell a well-designed game from a badly-designed one before it's built.
The full proposal covers the Octalysis framework, five candidate picking scenarios, the KPI and EEG methodology, and a quarter-by-quarter research timeline through 2025.