Virtual Reality brings a new insight to the markets

Virtual News Viewer

Occulus the makers of the latest virtual reality (VR) headset are planning to enter into the Capital Markets news space. VR has initially been targetted at 3D environments, Occulus research has been combining the many news feeds, Twitter and LinkedIn posts to aggregate stories with a common theme into a 3D 'news space' where the popularity and relevance of a story is represented by a Stars / Planets analogy, with the best stories being glowing stars, and secondary stories on the same topic being planets.

The vision at Occulus is to provide a 3D space in which a reader can zoom in to popular stories, and only read about the same topic once, something hard to avoid in these days of over-saturated news coverage. Occulus have made it clear that re-posting of press releases will be automatically detected, which will be represented by comets hurtling away from the reader, to avoid wasting their time.  

Data Repository Viewer

Occulus also mentions that they will be partnering with ClarusFT to create a 3D view of data inside Trade Repositories, where each TR/SDR will be a planet, with the data represented by cities for each asset class, suburbs for products (such as Swaps, Options and Futures) with virtual people running around the streets carrying the data payload for each trade.  Regulators have welcomed the ability to naviagate the highly complex data being collected by SDRs, where faults in the data will be represented by 'damage' to the suburbs where the bad data resides. Occulus suggest that to emphasise poor data quality the 'damage' will be animated using a meteor strike or Godzilla animation, with appropriate sounds, giving regulators an obvious way to spot data errors, zoom in, and identify the source of the problem.

Interconnectedness Investigator

Their final offering will be an inter-connectedness matrix investigator(tm) – a 3D representation of the CCPs, Custodians, Settlement Systems and Market Infrastructure, using a plumbing analogy, showing how capital markets activity flows between the many components in the post-trade space.  Their research team are trialling a visual approach where data flow is represented by material moving along pipes with the lumps of material being sized in proportion to the 'risk' represented by the event. For instance the exchange of principal on a Currency Swap will be a giant boulder being emitted from one firm, carried via the settlement plumbing into the nostro account tank for the receiving firm.  Occulus will be issing an RFP for firms to provide an un-blocking service for high risk flows through the financial plumbing system, with virtual plumbers visiting the system.

Pricing & Timing

Occulus expect to provide a full production service in March 2017 to correspond with the bilateral margin regulations, with access priced at zero for the first user, and in-app purchases for subsequent sign-ons. For more information on the VR headset visit https://www.oculus.com/en-us/rift/, and for more information on the financial plumbing click http://www.economist.com/node/7126393, you can try the beta service by clicking here (but make sure you get a headset first).