Servitization through VR serious games: from manufacturing to consumer electronics

The provision of services instead of the actual products is becoming a major area of interest for the products provision companies involved in the manufacturing, electronics and construction industries amongst others. Current work in the dissemination of the benefits of this business strategy has highlighted significant is-sues particular in services that require complex planning and bespoke structure for each client. The provision of such services is gradually migrating from the manufacturing sector to fintech and consumer electronics. The latter is a key part of the automotive industry and the new emerging technologies adopted by the rising market of Electric Vehicles (EV). Based on previous work on gamification of fintech servitization, this work explores the use of gamification to promote and demystify new software services and technologies in the automotive sector. To gauge the impact of gamification for such complex servitization offers, this study employs a case study of a prototype Augmented Reality (AR) – Head-Up Dis-play (HUD) system. The AR-HUD has been evaluated by 15 users in the Virtual Reality Driving Simulation Laboratory (VRDS Lab) aiming to identify user experience (UX) and educate the potential customers on the benefits of these technologies and the value of the relevant software upgrades.