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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

> It's hard to build high-enough fidelity into the hardware at a reasonable price point. And even if you did make VR goggles that were great for giant spreadsheets at $1000, it would be a weird enough idea that it would have to be massively better than $1000 worth of monitors to get people interested.

I doubt that. If you make a VR/AR/?R version of a Bloomberg terminal or Factset then finance firms will literally roll up wads of cash and throw them at you. It doesn't have to be massively better. It just can't be worse which is the real hurdle. Granted I'm not an expert on the subject but every VR/AR app I've seen that claims to be the "$APP Killer" simply sucks.

This is the same reason nobody has dethroned Excel in finance. There's plenty of things that solve specific sub problems but the generic, "I have tabs of data and I want to slice and dice it" always goes back to an analyst exporting data to an Excel file.

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I've never worked at a financial firm but I have a hard time imagining the uptight social culture of finance being one that embraces employees being spotted wearing goofy headsets and waving their hands around. The boost in productivity from any such app would seemingly be negligible, especially when you consider that the popularity of the Bloomberg terminal lies in its chat function:

https://www.ft.com/content/5d6c2d9c-1f61-11e5-ab0f-6bb9974f2...

https://www.ft.com/content/f16d73ee-a910-11e7-ab55-27219df83...

>>I've never worked at a financial firm but I have a hard time imagining the uptight social culture of finance being one that embraces employees being spotted wearing goofy headsets and waving their hands around.

Put some time in at a long/short or quant fund. This would be par for the course. I've been there.

> uptight social culture of finance

looooool ... You mean like the men having competitions to see who can hit the urinal from furthest away? or barefoot wrestling on the trading floor?

Those are both reputable stories I've had relayed to me about people I've worked with. More like a frat than an uptight environment ;)

Don't forget midget darts.

Things I've seen on the trading floor:

* Impromptu breath holding contests complete with prop bets and name chanting

* Chairs shoved, phones slammed, mice thrown, (full) drinks thrown, (Other people's) paper piles toppled, soooo much profanity.

* One time a trader yelled FKING FK very loudly as our EVP of Trading was giving a tour of the office to a business journalist. To which the EVP turned to the journalist and very calmly said, "With us, you always know where you stand."

Frat environment in its core is among the most conservative ones.

Frat-like behavior on trading floors is for members of the rich kids club or those willing to go through the initiation rituals. The lower-level staffers who support the traders are not invited to participate in such japes and are expected to look and act professional, not to be goofy individualists who have just as much fun at work as the traders.

I couldn't think of the right word, but whatever word is used to describe an environment in which suits are mandatory -- regardless of the frat like behavior :) http://www.businessinsider.com/dress-code-london-city-banks-...

I have a VR system and I wear it knowing that it makes me look like a total doofus. You also have zero ability to discern what's going on around you, e.g. to easily socialize with someone walking by. The productivity advantage a VR application would have to be huge for it to be worth doing things by VR, and the fact is that the fidelity just isn't there yet. I would also argue that even with fidelity, the usecases seem specious. But I also thought that the "Minority Report" scenes (which didn't involve a siloed-VR-helmet experience), while cool-looking, seemed like an extremely inefficient way to solve crimes.

Wow, maybe I was just lucky?

I worked on two different (energy) trading floors. One was a fairly large venture (30 or so trading desks + mid/back office + dev/ops/DC teams + management). The other was one of the huge banks. Both were in Stamford CT.

I spent well over 5 years there and never once did I see those sorts of shenanigans.

There was some stuff: the guy that liked to throw a football across the floor, occasionally smashing a monitor; the guys that bet $1000+ each over who could lose the highest % of body weight in 2 months (or was it one month?); and the occasional swearing, but nothing near the "like a sailor" level I hear about.

Pretty much everyone I worked with was highly professional. They were profit motivated (for sure), but even there I personally witnessed people making fair deals where they could have squeezed someone dry and unwinding deals at a loss to keep a good counterparty relationship.

I'm so glad I never worked with the handset smashing, drug abusing, loudly swearing, king of the world, type-A assholes that I hear about.

> Both were in Stamford CT.

Been there done that. Was the big bank one, the one with the keys in it's logo ? If so, you were using the Desktop OS build I designed :)

> I'm so glad I never worked with the handset smashing, drug abusing, loudly swearing, king of the world, type-A assholes that I hear about.

I think these days, thats largely confined to the Hedge-Fund traders. And those guys are EXACTLY the sort of people would love AR/VR based trading UIs - anything to make more money is always welcome in their world.

They would also enjoy the opportunity to simply walk around a bit, or maybe grab a coffee.

> as the big bank one, the one with the keys in it's logo

No. We were the other BS across the street.

lol @ uptight social culture of finance. Most trading desks are just ex-frat boys with quant skills or a connected uncle. They're all in on tech gadgets; they all have the latest smartphone / wearables / TV / smart home.

the regulatory compliance of Bloomberg lies in its chat function. seriously, type "sold for 10million" in there and it's a deal, reported to the SEC and sucked into end of day reporting

One important thing about VR goggles is that they are literally for your eyes only. You can be shoulder to shoulder with other people, and be sure they can't eavesdrop.

This can be quite important in certain circumstances.

> uptight social culture of finance

Ha! You don't know traders...

Some hedge funds do not have any uptight culture and they will most likely readily embrace the goofy glasses and gloves. Way better than a cluster of 6 monitors.

You might be able to collect a few wads of cash from finance firms who want a cooler-looking Bloomberg terminal, but I doubt this strategy could actually displace Bloomberg unless there's a technological edge that (1) delivers real, ongoing value and (2) can't be matched by Bloomberg within 1-2 years.

Problem #1 is what you mentioned with VR/AR $APP Killers - they mostly suck. They create value via novelty, which wears off. Bloomberg delivers value by addressing a really consistent set of needs in a solution highly familiar to many users across a whole industry, to the point it's hard not to buy it if you're in finance. It's like the industry's craigslist - lousy in many ways but good enough to stay entrenched (though Bloomberg's entrenchment is driven more through familiarity and brand rather than network effect, which makes it somewhat easier to compete against).

Problem #2 (being matched by Bloomberg) comes from Bloomberg having such domination of its market, and such deep pockets, that unless you are doing things they can't do they will just learn from and then kill you should you attain sufficient success. Although it might be easier to buy you!

You're not going to displace Bloomberg - the amount, quality and timeliness of the information they provide is on a completely different level (and a completely different business).

You're going to get wads of cash from people eager to consume their Bloomberg data in a better way.

I can assure you, the majority of people who regularly use the Bloomberg terminal are not eager for any change whatsoever to how they consume the data.

Any change, no matter how much it improves the workflow or UI is met with bitter resistance, because the users do everything from muscle memory, and small changes break that and slow them down.

I think this might be one place where that rule is broken. I started seriously using VR a while ago and I was blown away by some of the little things that make it 1000% better than a standard screen for some applications.

The most poignant example I have comes from gaming, but I think it illustrates the point. In Elite: Dangerous, some of your menus are to the left and right of your avatar. Normally, you'd have to press buttons to focus the camera on these menus; in VR all I have to do is look at where that menu is and it pops right up for me to use.

It actually made the interface _way_ more intuitive, easier to use, and significantly faster because it played on my expectation of the result. If something similar could be designed on top of Bloomberg data, I think you'd see finance people trampling each other to get it.

This would be particularly true if you played into their existing behaviors and motions; they wouldn't have to learn anything, it would "Just Work".

AR finance stuff looks great at trade shows but never gets picked up in deals.

I have no trouble believing you. I'm in the financial industry, although as an IT guy and not a finance one, but I gave back that utter abomination of the Lenovo Carbon X1 second generation because of the atrocious keyboard (touchstrip, ESC relocated, Tilde relocated, "split" Del/Backspace key etc).

Same reason I won't buy the new Macbook pro - they fucked with the ESC key, they instantly stopped existing as a viable product for me.

At no point did I suggest messing with their keyboard - just give them better visualization possibilities.

This reminds me of somewhere around 1998. I was on-site technician for a market-data software company that had was complimentary (live charting) to Bloomberg terminals. That year, we were updating our software from DOS to Windows NT. I spent a LOT more time than I ever imagined I would teaching men two to three times my age how to use a mouse. Many did not enjoy the change and most were quite adamant about saying so colorfully.

Those guys could run circles around me in the DOS version with just a keyboard. Seeing them use it now reminds me of watching someone with a decade+ experience with vim or emacs.

It's been a while since I've been in the AR/VR/3D space but last time I was there you just couldn't do high density text well at all.

Look at the effective resolution of your monitor and consider the percentage of the field of view that it occupies. You'd need to get something in the area of 6-8k resolution screens if not more to match the same effective resolution.

Well, the airforce had a laser scanner for their maintenance personal beaming pdf documents directly into the eye. Super sharp. Looked a bit like Google Glasses. Like in this picture: https://www.x.company/glass/

Handsfree search in docs.

“Can’t be worse”.

Yes it can. The resolution of AR/VR glasses is less than my iPhone or my laptop monitor.

Now you’re telling me that plugging in a big bulky headset is somehow going to deliver a not worse experience than thee other devices that don’t require an unparalleled level of immersion (both a pro and a con) yet able to show less detail?

I think he was stating that "can't be worse" was a requirement, not a fact. As in, it _must not_ be worse than existing options ($1000 in monitors), ie: resolution, as easy to do everything you already do, etc.

That's on purpose. Resolution is nothing in VR, reaction time is everything. You only need a very wide field, like 800x200px. This would be luxury VR glasses.

However for other, more non-immersive applications, like AR resolution became more important. Which leads go slower reaction times. Which can lead to sickness and lawsuits.

Another reason is that productivity has very specific integration, security, and deployment requirements before it is used. You would never look at a financial terminal that wasn't secured. A video game on the other hand? Sure, why not?

I’m afraid it’s a fact, the fidelity of current VR/AR tech just isn’t high enough. Money really is being thrown at the problem, but there is no magic wand available at any price. These advances take time.

When I was at <fairly large financial research website company> they had a prototype VR research project that was shown to a few people. Never seemed to gain any traction, and I didn't hear why.

A large part of a Bloomberg terminal value is the status. It's not like the UX is what's blocking evolution of the terminal.

Excel have been dethroned in every bank by bespoke software, unless you are talking about a tiny scale.

Oh wow, that’s interesting. I thought it was still super common. Do you have a link that I can read to learn more about every bank using custom software?

They aren't all using custom software. But all are using banking software provided by one of the big 4 providers in the industry: FIS, Fiserv, Jack Henry, and D+H

I believe they control 95%+ of the banking market.

I've worked / work for some of the largest banks in the world.. Excel has not gone anywhere..

Is it the best way? Hell no - but excel files still fly around on almost all meeting invites...

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