I recently had the opportunity to try out the Apple Vision Pro VR/AR headset – oh sorry, the Spatial Computing device! I know I’m late to the party. Plenty of people have tried them and reviewed them all over the place, so I’m not going to do that. I am more interested in their general purpose in the world of finance and banking.
In 2015 I published the God Drug and I predicted then that Virtual Reality would be a niche product: “He held up what looked like a high-tech helmet. TikTak had never seen one before, but he knew what it was. Full Virtual Reality had never hit the mainstream, but the military industry had found other uses for immersive technologies. The helmet was a sensory deprivation device used for torture. It controlled sight, sound, smell, taste and airflow.” Back then I saw VR as a niche product with very specific uses.
In 2017 I had a look at VR devices again, this time hoping I had been wrong in my prediction. There were many goggles hitting the market or about to hit. I myself bought a pair of Oculus VR goggles and wanted desperately for the tech to go mainstream. I proposed possible use cases within banking, such as:
Virtual Branch - Use VR and Social banking to create virtual branch where people can do banking. But also create completely new visualisations. For example I can’t imagine anything more satisfying than be in a visual representation of a vault where I can see my savings/investments as actual money. Or maybe just go for a virtual dip in your money like Scrooge McDuck!
Data visualisation - New ways of looking at data and assessing larger datasets in more dimensions that is currently practicable. Maybe create a VR version of the annual investors report?
A Virtual Trading workplace – Create a virtual experience by using AR/VR to show a virtual reality workstations for trading.
None of these went past even a cursory assessment. The business case just didn't stack up. What is the return on investment?
What has changed now? Apple joined the fray attempting to redefine the space with their spatial computing devices. My initial excitement returned. Maybe now the use cases I’d struggled to come up in the past would become obvious.
No. Nope. Negative.
I loved the experience. It was by far the best Augmented Reality implementation I have tried so far, and I could imagine many possible use cases, but none of them fitted within the banking sector. Even with Apple waving their magic wand over an existing technology and turning it Apple-esque, my doubts remain. What are relevant use cases for the financial industry for spatial computing?
Please tell me so I can make a good case for including it as a business expense!
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