The IMD Wrap: With Bloomberg’s headset app, you’ll never look at data the same way again

I’m standing in the middle of Joshua Tree National Park. The horizon is studded with boulders and gnarled, windswept trees and brush. I turn around to see rocks and sand surrounding me on all sides. Above me, small, fluffy clouds punctuate the sky, which is tinged at the edges with dusky hues. I look down at my feet, but they aren’t there. I am a disembodied pair of eyes in the middle of this Martian landscape. And I’m a little scared.

In reality, I’m not in Joshua Tree or even California. I’m in a basement meeting room in Bloomberg’s 731 Lexington Avenue offices in New York, trying out the Bloomberg app on an Apple Vision Pro augmented reality headset. Truth be told, even knowing this, I’m still a little scared—but no longer in the “I can’t see my own body” sense; rather, it’s the “I can see the future” type of fear. Apprehension, perhaps, mixed with excitement.

Using the headset is a little trippy and taking it off left me slightly disoriented. After having a screen right up close to them for a while, my eyes needed to readjust slightly, though because the screen inside the goggles are at such an ambient level—it’s not like looking at the bright, blue-white light of a computer screen—I didn’t realize that’s what my eyes were doing. Plus, while it’s not heavy, it’s not exactly light as a feather either. You may not feel its heft when it’s strapped on your head and the battery pack is in your pocket or on a table, but you definitely feel lighter once it’s off again.

The headset weighs less than 1.5lbs, which is about the same as having a large box of cereal taped to your head, but there’s a lot packed into this device. There are two high-resolution main cameras, six world-facing tracking cameras, four eye-tracking cameras, one TrueDepth camera, a Lidar scanner (Lidar, or Light Detection and Ranging, in case you haven’t been watching shows like Expedition Bigfoot, is a remote sensor that uses a laser to measure distances, usually for mapping terrain), four inertial measurement units, a flicker sensor, and an ambient light sensor. And no doubt, these components will get smaller and lighter over time, making the headset and accompanying battery pack less obtrusive in the future.

Think about being able to react more quickly to data simply by glancing at it and clicking your fingers

So, what’s the purpose of all this technology? When you put on and set up the headset (a few simple steps to optimize it for your eyes), you see the world around you exactly as it appears—albeit as though looking though lightly tinted sunglasses—but instead of seeing it through the goggles with your own eyes, you’re actually seeing an HD video feed of your environment. You can also choose “environments” (think of them as an immersive home screen background)—such as Joshua Tree, Mount Hood, White Sands, complete with sounds like rainfall or roaring winds—and dial their transparency up or down, depending on whether you want to shut out the world around you to focus or you want to basically add your favorite filter over wherever you’re using it.

That “wherever” is how Bloomberg believes people will use its Bloomberg Pro for Vision app on the headset: at home, to cut down on desktop real estate, or while traveling to be able to view data that might be proprietary, confidential, or sensitive with complete privacy. Need to work on that takeover deal during a flight? You don’t want the guy in the window seat getting wind of who’s buying who and risk the deal leaking out.

When you open the Bloomberg app, the familiar colors and design of the Bloomberg terminal’s mobile counterparts appear on the screen inside the headset as though floating in mid-air in front of you. While the interface is familiar enough to be intuitive, it’s still a new experience—for example, using a virtual keyboard (that is also flat, semi-translucent, and in mid-air) instead of using a mouse to point and click. Or, you can use your fingers to scroll, select, and zoom in or out on a touch screen with the headset, and items on the screen become highlighted as you look at them. To select them, you tap your thumb and forefinger together. Select news, videos, markets, securities—the content is very familiar, as is the look (if not the “feel”).

What’s different is that by creating what appears to be a big screen, or multiple big screens, in a small space, you can effectively squeeze your home office into a space the size of a virtual reality headset. Think of it like The Tardis from Doctor Who: an old British police phone box on the outside, yet a palatial spatial anomaly on the inside. It not only saves space but creates space where you have none.

It also saves time—or at least, it will once you get accustomed to using it: Think about being able to react more quickly to data simply by glancing at it and clicking your fingers, and the potential to look at charts in 3D, and literally dive into them, looking at them from all aspects, or being able to display other datasets alongside the Bloomberg app. You can literally connect the dots, pointing your fingers and drawing lines between floating windows to visually connect data points and create linkages where they didn’t exist before—perhaps even to third-party datasets not yet available via Bloomberg.

If the Vision Pro headset takes off among finance professionals, you can be sure other vendors will develop their own apps to showcase their data. For example, if ISI—which last week acquired fund flows data provider EPFR Global—were to create an app, one could watch liquidity flows moving between markets and look at macroeconomic factors in their app, then flick your eyes to the Bloomberg app to perform specific research on the sources and destinations of those flows. Imagine it as though all those app icons on your cell phone were actually open and running alongside one another on your phone’s screen but were big enough to see them and to be able to use them seamlessly at the same time, just as if you could harness their full power and flexibility on a much larger screen.

But speaking of power, that itself could be one barrier to broader adoption. Currently, the separate battery pack only lasts for two hours of general use before it will need recharging. That’s a lot less than your average laptop or cell phone battery. While not enough to substitute for the terminal for an entire workday, it’s enough time to catch up, perform a few tasks, check the markets, and so on. After all, it’s not designed to be used for an entire day; rather, you use it to do little things while on the move. All that said, the headset can be used while the battery is charging, so you could, in theory, be plugged into a power outlet and use it for longer periods. But that would limit your mobility and, like I said, that’s not the point: Bloomberg isn’t trying to replace its terminal with the headset app; it’s augmenting it so you can do more with it.

I will be very curious to see how the power consumption of Apple’s headset compares to that of a laptop or a computer with multiple monitors connected to it. If it’s more efficient, that may, over time, help users claw back some of the $3,500 price tag. But with all those individual sensors and cameras—tiny though they are—I wouldn’t be surprised if they consume quite a bit of juice.

But I also wouldn’t be surprised if the components become smaller, more powerful, and more power-efficient over time as the technology matures and evolves, especially considering the main market for these types of headsets is probably gaming and entertainment, which will drive better performance, cheaper models, and probably smaller and lighter designs that are even easier to use.

And as more apps designed for capital markets users become available—specifically, in the financial data space—more people in this industry will see its potential. Within that, I believe providers of alternative data—where often a picture tells a thousand data points, and where datasets such as geospatial tracking data, or satellite imagery of crops, oil fields, gas storage facilities, shipping routes, or retail point-of-sale data invite the user to immerse themselves within the data and explore it from different angles—will see great value in building apps to deliver their data in a way that makes it easy to visualize and get hands-on. Having that point-of-view perspective of being able to walk among the data may literally give users a new perspective on it.

This is to say that while I probably won’t be strapping on a headset again anytime soon, Bloomberg’s use of its offerings is very cool, and I expect to see other vendors follow suit.

So, if you’re one of those vendors building an app to give users that new perspective and bring big screens into a small space—or if you’re using Bloomberg or other apps on the headset—I’d love to hear about your experiences. You can share them with me at max.bowie@infopro-digital.com