Fast Experimentations with Virtual Technologies Pave the Way for Experience Economy

2019 Acta Polytechnica Hungarica  
The ongoing revolution in people's behavior, involving emphasized personal experiences, means that a product plays a decreasing role in competition, and creating an experience is becoming more important. This leads to new kinds of value chains and new kinds of networking, which will create challenges for companies. Cognitive infocomminacations (CogInfoCom) provide fast infocommunications links to extend our cognitive capabilities. Virtual technologies, such as virtual and augmented reality
more » ... R), will increase value creation by combining the strengths of humans and machines. The aim of this paper is to present an approach through which VR/AR with game programming tools can be utilized to boost business and enable new value creation in a world that is developing towards an experience economy. Our design methodology is based on agile innovation principles with fast experimentations that are carried out in co-creation with companies. The practical implementations are considered as multiple case studies. After introducing the current trends in VR/AR, we present our experiences of how these virtual technologies can be applied for CogInfoCom Aided Engineering tasks in various application fields. Despite the increasing popularity of virtual and augmented reality and game technologies, only a small amount of research has examined how they can be utilized professionally in the design processes of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). However, they provide effective tools for increasing user involvement in new product development and marketing. Based on the case studies, we present our experiences of how SMEs can benefit from virtual technologies by increasing their business agility and flexibility, reducing product design risk, shortening product development time, and enabling new business models. VR/AR technology with game programming proved to be effective tools for fast experimentation and co-creation with SMEs.
doi:10.12700/aph.16.6.2019.6.2 fatcat:krmgqy2jpfbk3k2xcickrciqdy