“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” – Marshall McLuhan
The interface has always been a negotiation. Between human and machine. Between insight and overload. Between reality and abstraction. But now, the interface is no longer a screen.
The interface is a room.
1. From Screens to Spaces
In finance, we’ve lived for decades in a world of rectangles: terminals, dashboards, spreadsheets, and heatmaps. Information arrives in grids, blink rates, and keystrokes. But this flat world is reaching its limit. As data volumes grow and complexity explodes, trying to cram everything into two dimensions is not just inefficient—it’s limiting our cognition.
Extended Reality (XR) – Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (MR) – offers a new contract. One where the user is not just a viewer, but a participant. Where analysis doesn’t sit on a screen: it surrounds you. (Check out https://flowimmersive.com/ if you haven’t done so!)
2. Finance Deserves Better Interfaces
Why XR, and why now?
Finance is the most information-dense domain in the modern world. Every decision, every second, is a negotiation between risk, reward, signal, and noise. Yet we ask traders, analysts, risk managers, and compliance officers to make decisions using input devices invented in the 1970s and paradigms built for yesterday’s data.
XR is not a gimmick. It’s the first interface that scales with you. The human brain evolved to understand space, movement, proximity, and depth. XR brings finance into those evolutionary sweet spots.
3. Use Cases That Transcend Screens
Imagine:
- Trade floor holograms where liquidity clusters literally float between asset classes.
- Risk heatmaps that wrap around a room, allowing you to walk through exposure zones.
- Regulatory audits in AR, highlighting areas of concern in a shared virtual boardroom.
- Data storytelling where charts become environments and insights are spatially anchored.
These are not science fiction. They’re prototypes today—and strategic differentiators tomorrow.
4. Beyond Utility: Collaboration, Presence, and Memory
XR does more than display—it anchors memory.
In spatial computing, ideas are not just read—they’re placed. And once placed in space, they’re easier to remember, navigate, and share. A compliance review conducted in a virtual space can leave behind persistent annotations. A team strategy session becomes a spatially encoded experience—harder to forget, easier to revisit.
Remote collaboration in XR is not a Zoom call. It’s presence. It’s subtle glances, posture shifts, and shared spatial understanding.
5. Open Systems, Not Walled Gardens
To thrive, XR in finance must remain open and interoperable.
The future isn’t an XR app. It’s a composable environment where FINOS-backed APIs, market data, internal analytics, and AI copilots coexist in a spatial web. This requires open standards, common ontologies, and shared governance models—something the financial open-source movement is uniquely positioned to deliver.
6. The Architecture of Rooms
When the interface becomes a room, we must ask:
- What does latency feel like in space?
- How do we balance privacy and persistence in shared XR rooms?
- What happens when the market bell rings in VR?
- What symbols will replace the blinking cursor in a world of gesture, gaze, and voice?
These are design questions, but they’re also human questions. Spatial computing forces us to reimagine not just how we interact – but why.
7. A Call to Action
We don’t need to wait for headsets to reach mass adoption. XR is already here – in pilot projects, in innovation labs, in fintech startups, and on the edges of enterprise. What’s missing is a manifesto. A shared commitment to explore, experiment, and embed finance into spatial computing responsibly.
So here it is:
The room is the interface. The market is multidimensional. And the future of finance is spatial.
Join us. Build the rooms. Rewrite the interfaces. Because in this new world – insight is not just a screen away. It’s all around you.