ARLAugmented Reality (AR) is defined by IAB as “an experience that utilizes a camera to change or enhance the user's view of the real world. This experience can be app-based or web-based, though app-based is more common today.  AR experiences are a new way to create context and add experiences over real physical world objects and attributes like location or recognized image or object."

AR- supported trading and data analytics platforms provide dealers and investors with sophisticated financial technology that enables them to monitor and visualize financial markets with enormous depth of information. Novel or improved representations of dynamic data through heatmaps or two-dimensional images, that switch to 3D shapes at the touch of a button or gesture enable holographic visualization, provide completely new insights: e.g. business opportunities and state-of-the-art developments can be highlighted more clearly on an intuitive interface, allowing traders to act faster. Thanks to AR and Mixed Reality (MR), users are no longer limited to the size of their computer, mobile phone or tablet display, but benefit from a true 360-degree view and almost unlimited applications.

By wearing an AR headset or AR goggles, sophisticated holographic representations of the financial data and feeds are displayed in the user's real field of vision: e.g. investors wishing to enter new markets can access precise historical data, using the tick market replay and backtesting functions to make fact-based decisions; financial analysts, who want to observe certain stocks on a larger stock exchange, can retrieve and visualize corresponding information with the full data depth; the past performance of the last months or years can be determined and forwarded immediately to the customer in the form of a holographic data representation.

With AR, the term "mobile workplace" takes on a whole new meaning, too, as customers or financial advisors can interact and speak with respondents located anywhere in the world on the spot and (via videoconference) in a virtual conference room. Actions in the AR financial landscape can be protected from prying eyes and treated confidentially. Or they can be reflected in the "viewer mode" for colleagues and customers on external computers that also work with AR technology. So, they can analyze the financial landscape together and interact with the data.

The sky seems to be the limit considering what we can expect from AR and new technologies, and what they will have up their sleeves.

By Daniela La Marca