Fidelity brings the stock market to Oculus Rift

Targeting a generation that grew up playing “SimCity,” Fidelity Labs on Wednesday unveiled StockCity, a software program that lets investors view a portfolio like a virtual world on their computer screen or in 3-D using an Oculus Rift headset. Users can build and view a city in which each building represents a stock. The width and length of the base represent shares outstanding and trading volume. The height goes up and down with the market price.

Hedging the possibility that Oculus Rift’s immersive goggles might someday become useful beyond video games, Fidelity Investments has mocked up a way for you to don the clunky eyewear and fly through your money. 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?”