A Hologram Might Be Worth A Million Numbers

I saw a fascinating article about how Fidelity, through their research arm Fidelity Labs, has released a virtual reality tool to portray financial information in a more visual manner -- not even using numbers.  I immediately thought about how this approach could apply to health care.

The Fidelity tool -- which can be viewed using virtual reality goggles or as in simulated 3-D on a browser -- is pretty cool.  Stocks are buildings, the height is their price, the size of the base is the trading volume.  Weather reflects whether markets are up or down, day/night indicates if markets re up or closed, and so on.  You can build your own "city" or neighborhood based on your portfolio or stocks/sectors you are following.

Fidelity got interested in this after Facebook acquired virtual reality company Oculus earlier this year (for a very real $2b), figuring Facebook might have some hint of where consumers were headed.  To date, virtual reality has been mostly thought of in terms of gaming, but Fidelity is thinking out of the proverbial box...