SAN FRANCISCO — Financial planning often involves lots of spreadsheets, pie charts and eyes glazing over.
Fidelity Investments aims to change that equation with an experiment in 3-D technology designed to make money management seem more like a mesmerizing video game than mundane number crunching. Welcome to StockCity, a virtual-reality landscape dotted with skyscrapers representing the stocks in a person’s investment portfolio. A Web version was released Wednesday at , but StockCity ultimately is meant to be viewed on the Oculus Rift, a virtual-reality headset that still hasn’t been released on the mass market.
StockCity’s architecture changes with the fluctuations on Wall Street. The heights of the buildings are determined by the prices of the stocks in an investment portfolio, while the widths are based on the number of outstanding shares. When the market is open, it’s daytime in StockCity, and night falls when the market closes.
