The casino industry has seen a lot of changes throughout the years. Especially since the dawn of the internet and more people wanting to gamble online instead of going to offline casinos and sitting in front of your opponents in real life.
Back in the day online casinos were only limited to slot games. The was mainly due to the fact that there wasn’t enough development on the internet for players to be able to play the more sophisticated games on a website.
Even if a developer did build a game that was good, it would slow down the entire website on the users end because the internet speeds weren’t fast enough back then. So even if the game was just 5MB in size, it would take more than a couple seconds or sometimes even a minute or two for the website to load.
This didn’t make practical sense because the internet connection needed to be stable for the players to play against other players online.
Now, with 4G available in almost all parts of the world, people can play these sophisticated games on their smartphones even. And not just that, in this article we are going to cover how there is going to be another wave of evolution that is going to take place in the casino industry thanks to multiple different technologies progressing at the same time.
Gambling With a Virtual Reality Headset
This might sound really far-fetched but it is possible for you to gamble online wearing a VR headset. Yes, you could just put on your headset and feel like you actually are in a casino sitting in front of your opponent.
Remember I said that people prefer to gamble online much more than having to go to a casino. Well, with a VR headset, the casino is coming to you.
Imagine being able to have such an immersive feeling while playing blackjack that you forget that you are sitting on your couch in your home.
As more and more people buy VR headsets and compatible PCs, the easier it becomes for the casinos to develop games that will cater to the VR gambling crowd. It all depends on how quickly VR technology can be adopted by the masses.
The more people that start using VR, the higher the chances that the online casino websites will start putting in serious money on their websites to be VR compatible.
Right now though, we haven’t seen any websites offer VR as an option. The main reason for this is the number of people that have a VR headset is very low so it doesn’t make sense for them to invest a lot of money into it.
But with time and with the costs of owning a VR headset going down, we can see this become a reality sooner rather than later.
Augmented Reality (AR)
Augmented reality is another aspect that could come to online casino websites at the same time as VR. We think AR and VR go hand in hand because AR can enhance the entire experience you have in VR. The best part about it is that you can now use either your mobile or computer and have a 360-degree online casino experience at any time.
Yes, that smartphone in your hand is so powerful that it can actually project a 360-degree virtual world and make it look almost real.
There is a caveat though.
The augmented reality technology needs more development than virtual reality. And AR development is slower compared to VR mainly because VR technology is more in demand right now. However, new artificial intelligence is getting really exciting and someone will apply that to augmented reality soon.
More people are interested in just putting on a headset and playing the games that they love. Augmented reality offers something more than just VR but people have to fully experience VR and think about how they can improve on their experience by combining AR.
But yes, AR will become mainstream at one point it just might take longer than VR to get there.
To Sum It Up
Yes, more and more people are getting on the VR platforms and starting to play games that they love. But there is also a huge barrier to entry for most people because when it comes to VR gaming, they have to spend a couple hundred extra dollars on top of what they would already be spending to get access to the VR technology.
These usually are the people that are on a strict budget when assembling a gaming PC. So most people opt to not get a VR headset and end up spending more money on either the CPU or the GPU because both of those components can make the overall gaming experience better.
The main problem is the price. The lower the price of these VR headsets get, more people can buy them. Eventually there has to come a point where the price of VR headsets would be so low that people wouldn’t have to think twice about buying them.
Either that, or almost all game development companies will have to start developing VR versions of the games in conjunction to the flatscreen/traditional version of the games that they usually make.
That way, there will be more incentive for people to want to try out their favorite video games in VR mode rather than just wait for the VR headset prices to drop.
But this will take a lot of convincing and deal-making for VR headset developers to get the game development companies onboard with this plan. So far, the 2nd option seems like the most likely scenario.