Amazon and Fidelity Labs Joined Hands on a Virtual Reality Financial Agent
Amazon and Fidelity Labs have collaborated to create a digital financial advisor that people can interact with, using their VR Headsets.
Both the companies on Tuesday gave a virtual reality demonstration, where a Fidelity lab, which is a research lab on Fidelity investments, created a virtual reality financial agent to assist people via their VR headset.
Amazon and Fidelity Labs have developed this digital finance advisor to help people know about their stock portfolios by interacting with the advisor using virtual reality. This will completely change the way people take assistance from their financial advisors. Other than making the process easier, it will also allow users to contact their advisors any time.
The virtual reality demo given by the company is a part of Sumerian VR and AR developer tools by Amazon, which is now available to use by the general public to create apps using virtual and augmented reality.
As per Adam Schouela, the vice president of Fidelity Labs, the company has used the Sumerian tools to develop the VR demo to understand possible ways to use the VR technology.
If the technology gains success among consumers, the financial services company will be prepared to create VR apps to assist its users, Schouela said. This technology will allow people to interact with Cora, a financial planner, who will assist consumers to check the stock performance of a particular company.
In the video demonstration, Cora was also able to hear and respond to a person’s voice, which will make it more convenient for users to meet their need while reducing the troubles of triggering certain commands using VR controller. Cora is also the first ever virtual host built by Amazon Sumerian.
However, Amazon is planning to use this VR experiment to lure business by creating VR apps using Amazon tools and Amazon Web Services cloud computing features. Kyle Roche, the general manager of Amazon believes that collaborating with Fidelity labs provides an opportunity to the company to develop VR coding tools that would meet the needs of the company, rather than just video games developers.
“What we tried to do is make these characters approachable enough and not too cartoony so they look like Tomb Raider,” Roche said of the Fidelity Labs VR app. As of now, this VR experiment is to be used by Fidelity labs only, and there is no plan for a wider release.
