On March 16, the Dow closed over 10,000, the S&P 500 ended at 1310.17, and 747.6 million shares changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange. And Anne Allen, senior VP of floor operations, monitored it all on the NYSE's new 3-D trading floor - a VRML dataworld of network performance, order flow, price movement, and a dozen other systems that keep the tickers ticking.
Launched in March, the virtual trading floor project was conceived several years ago when NYSE execs saw an eye-popping demo of 3-D visualizations by SGI. With the basic idea in mind, the exchange enlisted Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture, of New York-based Asymptote Architecture. Create a space, the NYSE charged, that shows the correlation of Dow stocks affected by a crisis in the Brazilian market, and link trading data to related news and company announcements.
Rashid and Couture had been exploring virtual spaces and datascapes for years (he colaunched the Paperless Studio project at Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture), and they were intrigued by the chance to apply that experience. The duo built both the fluid VRML data world and its physical command center, set on the ramp between the two main rooms on the exchange floor. Sixty flat-screen monitors display network information, trading data, and live news feeds. Operations managers can fly through a representation of the NYSE systems, quickly scan the virtual floor to gauge trading activity, or zoom in for a view of, say, the exact workstations that will be affected by a network quirk. "The difference is in how fast we can identify a problem, grasp the business implications, and account for the situation," says Allen.
Over time, more systems will be added to the 3DTF (as the exchange calls it), but even in these early months, the flashy-as-a-press-conference-stage system is "more than a pretty face," according to Allen. The NYSE, she says, went virtual to meet a critical challenge: turning data into information.
- Real-time animated stock tickers surge and fall as they track the major stock indices.
- A virtual network shows which specialist station is connected to which workstation is connected to which server in the computer room. In the event of a breakdown, the point of failure and all affected systems light up.
- The trading posts on the physical floor of the exchange are represented by virtual posts that visually report business and systems events. The yellow indicators turn blue when stocks begin trading. A red flap symbolizes a network or computer problem. Specific icons alert managers when a stock has exceeded its standard thresholds in, for example, trading volume or share price.
- What's next? Exchange managers will soon be able to group specific issues - say, Dow components or tobacco companies or Brazilian stocks - in a container for special monitoring. Click on a particular ticker to call up the relevant data for a specific stock. Or view aggregate statistics like total volume for all of the selected stocks by clicking on that data element.
