Seeking young investors, Fidelity Labs looks to Oculus Rift

Sean Belka, head of Fidelity Labs, poses for a portrait wearing an Oculus Rift headset, which can be used to view the company's new product StockCity, at Fidelity Investments on November 18, 2014 in San Francisco, Calif. less Sean Belka, head of Fidelity Labs, poses for a portrait wearing an Oculus Rift headset, which can be used to view the company's new product StockCity, at Fidelity Investments on November 18, 2014 in San ... more Photo: Pete Kiehart / The Chronicle Photo: Pete Kiehart / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 8 Caption Close Seeking young investors, Fidelity Labs looks to Oculus Rift 1 / 8 Back to Gallery

Targeting a generation that grew up playing “SimCity,” Fidelity Labs on Wednesday unveiled StockCity, a software program that lets investors view a portfolio like a virtual world on their computer screen or in 3-D using an Oculus Rift headset.

Users can build and view a city in which each building represents a stock. The width and length of the base represent shares outstanding and trading volume. The height goes up and down with the market price.

Each building sits in a neighborhood such as technology, consumer stocks or utilities, so users can see easily if they are properly diversified. The sky goes from sunny to cloudy to rainy depending on the overall market. Eventually, little birds representing social media chatter (green ones for positive comments, red for negative) might fly over buildings.

It’s all part of a mad dash by financial companies to win the loyalties of Millennials who are just beginning to invest.

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“Some people like spreadsheets or pie charts. Millennials want to be engaged differently. They don’t want to read a white paper,” said Sean Belka, who heads up Fidelity Labs, the research-and-development arm of Fidelity Investments. With StockCity, they can envision a portfolio “without ever seeing a single number or percentage.”

The program is still in the experimental stage; Belka called it “our minimally viable product.” It was released this week so Fidelity could show it off at an active-traders conference in Las Vegas and begin gathering feedback. Belka demonstrated the program at Fidelity’s investor center in San Francisco on Tuesday.

For now, users can go to www.fidelitylabs.com and load a watch list of up to 100 stocks on their computer, but they can’t enter a specific number of shares or link it to an actual portfolio. In terms of usefulness, it is far outstripped by traditional portfolio-tracking programs.

Eventually, users will be able to enter their own portfolio of not just stocks but also mutual funds and exchange traded funds, and compare it with securities they’d like to buy or other investors’ portfolios. “This is, for some people, an easier way to learn about financial markets, pattern recognition and scenario modeling,” Belka said.

“You can look at your portfolio, put in a watchlist of other stocks and say, 'What if my portfolio looked like this?’”

The 3-D version won’t be available until Facebook releases an Oculus Rift headset for consumers, which won’t happen until next year (at the earliest).

Fidelity is one of many financial companies establishing digital labs or innovation centers to develop and try out products using cutting-edge technology. Visa, Wells Fargo and Capital One have recently opened or announced labs in San Francisco. In September, Wells Fargo’s Digital Labs showed how consumers could use an Oculus Rift headset to visit a virtual bank teller.

Fidelity Labs is based at Fidelity’s headquarters in Boston. It has about 75 employees worldwide, including three in San Francisco, where it might add a few more.

Started in the late 1990s, it is focused on products that won’t be commercially available for three or more years. Three years ago, the lab was working on mobile apps, social media, big data and cloud computing, Belka said. “Now we are looking at things around artificial intelligence and gamification interfaces.”

StockCity was originally called FinCity but the name was changed because it could only handle stocks. It started when some interns said they couldn’t understand some investing concepts. “They were technology people, not financial people,” Belka said. But they did grow up playing video games that used concepts, such as pattern recognition, that could be incorporated into portfolio management.

Viewing stocks through a bulky 3-D headset may look silly today, Belka said. But so did Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in the 1987 movie Wall Street, walking on a beach talking on a mobile phone the size of a shoe.

Kathleen Pender is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Net Worth runs Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail: kpender@sfchronicle.com Blog: http://blog.sfgate.com/pender Twitter: @kathpender