Fidelity’s Oculus App Lets You Fly Through Your Investments
[Philip Leyveld comment: VR allows you to break out of the limitations of the computer display 'frame' and be surrounded by data. This is an example of immersive data visualization. Productivity tools, even more than entertainment, may be VR's future.]
In Fidelity’s prototype virtual environment—which it says is the first financial services app written for Oculus—stocks are represented as office towers and lumped together in sector “neighborhoods.” The buildings’ footprints are shaped by trading volume and their rooftops are red or green depending on changes in price.
Fidelity is not claiming to have solved any actual problems with the app. But with $2 trillion under management, it wants to get ahead of how new interfaces might be used. “We have a hypothesis that virtual reality will take off in the consumer set in the next three to five years, so therefore we want to understand the technology,” says Hadley Stern, vice president at Fidelity Labs, a research wing of the brokerage company. “We want to get their feedback on this and start to think: how would active traders and other investors use virtual worlds to understand data?”
The company is unveiling the app, called StockCity, this week at a trade show for stock traders in Las Vegas.
But for now, Fidelity isn’t letting anyone access actual brokerage accounts until it works out security and user-authentication protocols for goggle-wearers.