Analyzing financial data in extended reality

This article appeared first on the Bloomberg Terminal.

The pressure is on for organizations to manage and activate data for the benefit of their business. The global volume of data captured, replicated, and consumed annually will double in size from 2022 to 2026, with enterprise data growing more than twice as fast as consumer data, according to research by IDC.

Bloomberg is always experimenting with emerging technology and our teams are constantly exploring new ways to pinpoint information instantly through innovative uses of data. After a team off-site, Ravi Sawhney, Global Head of Trade Automation & Analytics, teamed up with UX designer JP Stapleton and a team of engineers to consider new ways for Bloomberg clients to visualize, interrogate, and gain insights from the growing volumes of financial data (e.g., market ticks have more than doubled from about 130 billion ticks/day in 2018 to more than 300 billion ticks/day in 2023).

Here’s how Ravi and JP describe the thinking that led them to come up with one potential approach to this challenge.

“Innovation is about creating the right environment where cross-functional teams are free to explore,” said Ravi Sawhney. “People have to feel empowered and safe to take bigger risks than they might otherwise. It is also important that these teams listen to feedback, even if it means challenging their initial hypotheses. It may be that the idea could better answer a totally different question.”

“It’s about trying new solutions to our problems,” said JP Stapleton.“The problem doesn’t change, the fundamental human need to understand the world around us doesn’t change, but the world around us does change. We have these novel capabilities that are new and therefore not optimized or efficient, so we use them in a certain way that may not maximize their potential. But if you take a step back and imagine a future where we had a particular problem solved by a different approach, what might that look like? That’s the type of thinking that helps us keep pace with change.”

Viewing data in one or two dimensions (2D) is certainly effective, but tracking two variables over time is difficult in 2D because they overlay onto the same space. As the world becomes more digitized, the need to find meaningful correlations across data with multiple dimensions is fast approaching the limits of what can be understood using a 2D plot. So, using the IATK (Immersive Analytics Toolkit) Library, an open source Unity project for building data visualizations in extended reality, a small but dedicated team brought three-dimensional (3D) data into a 3D workspace.

Immersive data discovery

Financial professionals and traders often use multiple monitors to display different screens, charts, analytics, and news feeds to keep tabs on the markets and financial instruments they’re trading and tracking. They are completely immersed in their workspace, and they want that interface to be as high bandwidth as possible. With extended reality (XR) technology, all the space around them in their physical world has the potential to become their digital workspace. They can be surrounded by plots, diagrams, and maps in an immersive XR environment to find what they are looking for quickly and spot new insights by looking at data differently.

“Starting with the library, we built incrementally,” JP Stapleton shared. “We allowed users to physically assemble the 3D plots in a very intuitive way. We added features, collected user feedback, and kept iterating. We found that people were engaged with exploring the data in a tangible way and forgot about the technology. So we focused on data manipulation and continued experimenting along those lines.”

Scott Davidoff co-authored the paper Immersive and Collaborative Data Visualization Using Virtual Reality Platforms, which explains why effective data visualization is “an essential component of the scientific path from data into knowledge and understanding” and explores the use of immersive VR platforms.

Explaining further, Davidoff writes, “Immersion provides benefits beyond the traditional desktop visualization tools: it leads to demonstrably better perception of a datascape geometry, more intuitive data understanding, and a better retention of the perceived relationships in the data.”