Amazon design vet can’t shake desire to create art and music, so he left to build a new VR experience

Grant Hinkson spent almost nine years at Amazon, leading design engineering within the company’s Devices and Services Design Group. He left a little over a year ago to launch his own game development project and pursue passions that do more to scratch a longtime creative itch.

The first upcoming release from Hinkson’s Parietal Lab is “Connectome,” a virtual reality, 3D connect-the-dots-style “art and game experience,” as he describes it. It’s available for pre-order on Meta Quest.

“There are elements of game play within the space, and there are elements of mystery, and you’re not immediately clear exactly what you’re supposed to do — and that’s kind of the game aspect,” Hinkson said.

Pinching, grabbing and connecting dots, players in “Connectome” find points within rooms that can be interacted with, and they create and reveal objects that open doors to other rooms as they move through the VR space.

The meditative experience is further enhanced by the ambient musical score, which was also created by Hinkson. Rather than farm out that aspect of building “Connectome,” he called writing the music one of the biggest joys of the past year.

“I’ve played the piano since I was in first grade, and I’ve pretty much always written,” Hinkson said. “As a musician, I know what the feeling is that I want to evoke in each of these spaces, and so I have been really hands on with it.”

Hinkson spent more than five years at Microsoft before his move to Amazon, where he worked on the Echo family of products, Fire TV, Fire tablets, and the Alexa mobile app. He led a team of design technologists within the design studio who did some prototyping work in VR, but he wasn’t the person who was hands on in Unity, so he wasn’t an expert in the space.

When asked whether leaving to build a trippy VR game was his answer to the intensity of working at a tech giant, Hinkson acknowledged there’s probably some psychology to it.

“I think I’m a creator at heart,” he said. “Building and making is what just lights me up. The most fun I had at Amazon was when we were inventing new things and creating experiences.”

He thinks VR is the best place right now to tell stories as an artist, where he has complete control of world building. The success of “Connectome” and whether he can get people to buy his experience will be a test, to prove whether he can keep creating in VR.

Hinkson has assembled the pieces that many creators chase — he left a successful career, he’s making art and music, he’s programming his own game, he’s working from home and calling all of his own shots. Can he make a living doing all the things that he loves?

“That is the final piece, right?” he said. “That I get to keep doing this, because it is so fulfilling and satisfying. These things that I loved 10, 15, 20 years ago are still in me. And they still mean a lot.”