Trading in Virtual Reality

The boom in working from home and the closure of many physical spaces has provided many companies specializing in Virtual Reality with the incentive to experiment in an innovative way in the most diverse fields. Among these, a little unexpected but promising, is trading. The American Glimpse Group, based in New York, has chosen former analyst Morgan Stanley Andy Maggio as a consultant to create a VR universe dedicated to traders. The technology is not yet ready for debut, but it is preparing to make the trading experience much more complete and immersive than what you can have in the physical space. “Typically traders can keep track of six to eight screens,” explains Glimpse Group CEO Lyron Bentovim, “which is limiting. With our tool we give the possibility to see and interact at least a dozen screens, stratifying the data or immersing oneself in them without being constrained by physical limits ”. The first VR tests for traders were tested by FlexTrade already three years ago, starting from the same assumption: there is not enough space on the desks. The results, however, were not very promising: a trading environment entirely in VR confused and literally gave you seasickness. It was therefore preferred to focus, for subsequent developments, on augmented reality systems that enlarge the available space and allow data to be handled outside physical boundaries, avoiding the alienating effect of an entirely virtual environment. This could also be the right answer for shopping, where stores entirely in VR have so far been a niche trend, but where augmented reality is an element capable of integrating the online experience with the physical one, and lends itself well to ecommerce so to stores. In the impossibility given by health precautions to have the products tested directly, for example, the Sephora perfumery chain has installed screens in the stores that frame the customer’s face and allow you to virtually apply the tricks you choose to try on the digital image. A similar tactic also used by Timberland, which has installed virtual io dressing rooms that make the person – or rather, his avatar – wear the chosen clothes without having to try them on. a time now past. This is the case of the historic Postalmarket catalog, a pioneer of mail order sales in Italy, which this autumn will return to newsstands accompanied by an app that is an integral part of the experience. The Treviso-based startup No Gravity has developed a mobile interface that will help in the shopping experience with ecommerce and editorial content, but above all with augmented reality videos that can be viewed by framing the objects that interest us in the paper catalog. The new Ikea app also allows us to make purchases online faster or arrive in the store with clear ideas, saving time and avoiding crowds. Even at home you can place the furniture in our living room by framing the real environment through an augmented reality tool, which also adapts the dimensions of the hologram, to see how it integrates with the furniture and colors. The result is extremely realistic and allows you to virtually furnish physical spaces avoiding calculation errors on size and style.