Multidisciplinary Wow experiences boosting SMEi

This paper describes our experiences in developing multidisciplinary Wow experiences to boost business for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Wow experiences — outstandingly positive user experiences — are an increasingly important design target in product and service development contexts because they can help reveal customer needs. The basic idea in our Wow approach is to bring together various disciplines and companies from different fields. Linguistic elements and language tools, virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), and game programming are examples of technologies that can be adapted for multiple fields. Our approach will also illustrate our strategies to utilize students' capabilities as an important factor in our RDI and business development. Our experiences will be concretized with examples of case studies that include versatile application fields from manufacturing to interior design, health care, tourism, exhibition, and cultural heritage applications. In our ongoing projects, we are carrying out fast experimentations to study how SMEs can utilize digital Wow effects to enhance product presentations, marketing, engineering applications, and other areas.