2005 Computerworld Honors Program

	The Metaphor Mixer Maxus Systems International New York, NY USA Year: 1994 Status: Laureate Category: Finance Insurance & Real Estate Nominating Company: Intel Corporation
	Metaphor Mixer is the first commercial virtual reality application to manage financial portfolios using live market information. Users feel as if they are swimming through an ocean of data. They can interact with a software agent that seeks investments based on user-selected criteria.
	The Metaphor Mixer is a data manipulation and display software system that depicts graphically multiple aspects of individual financial instruments grouped by markets and industries. It does this all simultaneously, converting real-time and historical data into animated visualizations of instrument and market activity. Metaphor Mixer is the first commercially available system to use "virtual reality" technology to manage financial portfolios using live, market information. As an example, Metaphor Mixer divides the computer screen into squares similar to a chess board. Countries are designated down the side and industry groups appear along the top. Within each square, instruments are identified by a chip. In fact, the market terrain can be set up with almost any combination of factors: derivatives versus time frames and expirations; derivatives versus underlying instruments; etc. Staying with this example, multiple attributes of each instrument are communicated by: Shape -- triangle, square or pentagon signifies market capitalization. Identification Texture -- Company logo is embossed on each shape. Color -- Red indicates high volatility, with shading indicating amount of volatility, changing to shades of blue for low volatility. Luminance or Brightness -- can be varied to call attention to instruments with trading patterns breaking significantly away from historic norms. Animated Movement -- shapes may blink or spin according to preset sort criteria such as earnings, P/E ratios, short selling or a variety of other factors. Height -- Height of each shape above or below the grid shows percentage change for the day. It can also signify other user-configured criteria. Arrow -- Arrow vector attached to each shape rotates as the stock moves relative to its trend or traditional chart points. Other available attributes that can be programmed into an application include sounds, voice interaction and voice feedback. These can be combined to provide a more "human" interface. In all, Metaphor Mixer can track ten attributes of individual instruments. Metaphor Mixer's Al (artificial intelligence) software agent searches for attributes the user assigns by country or industry. In addition, the user can employ a "spaceball" to fly into a specific square and observe instruments' activity in close-up. Users get the name of the stock and all particulars by clicking on the shape. Like a looking glass for investment insight the Mixer provides a medium for simplifying large amounts of information and helps you identify opportunities and discern the patterns and trends in the financial markets, which, in turn, allow you to analyze and act on data more quickly and effectively.
	The Metaphor Mixer has allowed traders, money managers and other financial information professionals to feel the pulse of the activity in the markets. For the first time, they can literally fly over the financial markets of their interest and gain a broad overview of current conditions there. It helps them simplify large amounts of information and isolate anomalies and inefficiencies by combining the many variables involved in the investment decision making process. The Metaphor Mixer has turned the daily flood of financial information into an interactive, pictorial representation and the subsequent act of acquiring knowledge from that information, an experience in a computer created environment. Those who use it say it has affected them by vastly expanding their market coverage. They can now control a greater quantity of information and search for opportunities that fit their criteria from a larger universe of instruments. As a result, they are more productive with their time spent analyzing the markets.. Although designed originally as an interface for financial information, The Metaphor Mixer need not be restricted to the finance industry and can be adapted to suit the needs of any information professional. As a high-level database interface, it can be applied towards solving problems in the representation of information and statistics in areas as diverse as environmental information, procurement information, military logistics, legal information, and sports results and performance statistics. The Metaphor Mixer provides the grammar for a visual language. It gives one ten independent visual and auditory cues that map and isolate variables and decision criteria.
	The Metaphor Mixer is an amalgamation of diverse high technology components that have been applied together as a way to solve the problem of managing and organizing large amounts of financial information. It makes use of advanced hardware and software and was initially developed with an Intel DVI board and the Sense8 WorldToolKit VR engine. The combination of these two components along with Maxus' Capri real-time market software made the development of The Metaphor Mixer possible in a business setting and provided for the first time a cost effective solution to virtual worlds applications building. The Metaphor Mixer makes innovative use of existing VR technology by complementing it with the real-time market information of Wall Street. By turning the abstract information into a notional financial terrain, The Metaphor Mixer paints the landscape of current market conditions. This landscape never looks the same from one moment to the next as trading information feeds into and changes it dynamically.
	The initial concept of The Metaphor Mixer developed out of our customization work for various pension fund and trading clients in support of Capri -- our first product for the financial markets which Maxus released in 1988. Capri is a real-time integrated database and financial analytic engine that provides portfolio management, risk analysis, and derivative analytics on all types of financial instruments and incorporates the standard Microsoft Windows GUI interface. In 1992, Maxus introduced Metaphor Mixer, the first product to use futuristic technology to deliver the next generation of software support to the financial industry. The virtual reality (VR) techniques of Metaphor Mixer take all of the information tracked and managed by Capri and depict it in animated, graphic form. Traders can track a large number of instruments and tell at glance what is happening with multiple aspects of each instrument. It provides a competitive advantage to users by communicating information more quickly and allowing traders to analyze data and take action faster than those who use conventional analysis tools. The Metaphor Mixer is the only available tool for summarizing and presenting large quantities of financial information in an easy to comprehend, visually stimulating format. Metaphor Mixer places the investor in a computer-generated, animated market dataspace. The investments within the investors universe are represented by icons, and each visual attribute of each icon is associated with an aspect of the investment's movement and performance. With a single glance, the investor takes in the most critical details of his universe _ percentage changes, sensitivity to interest rates, and any other parameters of concern.
	Metaphor Mixer has been installed initially with a select group of clients who have now been using it successfully for more than two years. It is with their valuable input and suggestion that we continue to improve the system and work toward better integrating it as a crucial component of daily financial analysis and decision making. Maxus hopes to establish Capri and The Metaphor Mixer as a platform for the trader workstation of the future. In no way do we believe The Metaphor Mixer has achieved or exceeded its goals. The potential for utilizing interactive 3-D space for data representation is brand new and wide open to possibilities. Those who use computers everyday are now just starting to feel comfortable with the concepts behind virtual reality software techniques. But in the next 18 months, the average computer user will have the hardware and parallel processing capability that handles the intense processing demands of real-time 3-D rendering and graphics. In anticipation of this, we are concentrating our efforts on refining The Metaphor Mixer as a new human/computer interface for information processing.
	Many problems needed to be overcome for the success of this work. In proposing a completely different interface for financial information, we had to overcome significant challenges to convince those of the potential of the technique.