Amazon And Fidelity Labs Launch VR Financial Advisor

Amazon and Fidelity Labs have teamed up to create a digital financial advisor that people can interact with using a virtual reality headset.

According to Fortune, the demonstration on Tuesday (May 15) helped to showcase Amazon’s Sumerian VR and augmented reality developer tools available to the public to create VR and AR apps.

Fidelity Labs, the research lab of Fidelity Investments, created the VR demo using the Sumerian tools to test out ways the financial company could use VR in the future if the technology is successful with consumers, said Fidelity Labs vice president Adam Schouela.

The VR demonstration showed how people can talk to a virtual financial planner named Cora who can listen to their requests to see the stock performance of a certain company. From there, Cora can have the stock chart appear on a wall in her virtual office as if she’s showing off a financial graph on a virtual projector.

Schouela noted that one of the highlights is Cora’s ability to hear and respond to a person’s voice so that people don’t have to fidget with a VR controller.

While the VR experiment is currently for Fidelity Labs only, the company does plan to show it to Fidelity customers in order to get their feedback.

As for Amazon, this experiment is a way for the eCommerce giant to attract businesses that want to create VR apps using its tools, the Amazon Web Services cloud computing features. Amazon Sumerian General Manager Kyle Roche added that the project with Fidelity Labs would help Amazon create VR coding and tools to fit the specific needs of companies instead of video game 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.