If online casinos have done one thing in their transition from physical to digital, it’s that they’ve remained accessible. It’s a matter of convenience to be able to turn on your phone and be able to play a hand of poker almost immediately. Here, we’re often focused on the performance of individual pieces of hardware, but it’s quite something to see how easy it is to boot up software on just about any device.
However, with technology continuously evolving and demanding better performance as a result, we can’t help but wonder how online casinos will stay accessible in the upcoming age of virtual reality. After all, the technology can be fairly taxing and until now has always required costly extra equipment, We’ll take a deep dive and talk about what we think online casinos will do to stay accessible to most amount of players.Â
Certain Games Will Start The Trend
Despite VR making just about any game more engaging, we think certain games will be brought into the realm of VR first as it lends itself to the technology well. Among those, slingo bingo and other variants of that game type seem to be the perfect candidates to make the leap. While VR isn’t seen in online casinos yet, we think that could change very soon. Because there are so many different types of bingo out there, players will immediately have a slew of options to test out their VR hardware.
We also think bingo would be far less demanding than games such as poker or blackjack where players would have an in-game avatar. It’s in this ease of rendering and variety of game options that we think bingo would make a perfect first game to kick off the online casino VR experience. Right off the bat players could try out Slingo Starburst, Fishin’ Frenzy, and Slingo Fire & Ice – all games that are played in a similar way but have completely different presentations. Not only that, but they’d all be easy to make that transition to mobile play, so phone players wouldn’t need to wait long to get it on their device.Â
A Smooth Transition
Although phones won’t be able to meet the demands of VR right away, we think consoles and computers will bear the weight of the transition early on. Mark Zuckerberg is already talking about an enhanced VR headset with face-tracking coming out in October, and chances are that technology would be far too much for a phone, but it’s a start. As this technology is explored further and developers find ways to make it more bite-size, we’ll see the transition over to the phone. However, that doesn’t mean online casino players will have to wait their turn. They’ll just be limited to playing on a computer or console for the first few years. This will foster a smooth transition to phones while still making the technology accessible to interested players.Â
New Games Will Come
While this might be the most “out there” proposition, we also think it’s the most exciting. As mentioned above, some games will be more difficult to transition to virtual reality right away. However, we think new games and game types will be created to smoothly bring together online casinos and VR.
There’s already fresh software out there being developed with VR as the main reason for its creation, and we think this could extend into the realm of casino games. Perhaps a game where a matrix of cards floats in front of you or dice need to be rolled in certain orders. While making a game from scratch is easier said than done, we believe the advent of this new technology could breathe new life into online casinos in the form of games we haven’t seen before. The kicker would be that these new games would be available on all hardware platforms.
This would not only stay in line with the goal of heightened accessibility, but it would also potentially bring in new players. That could be key to keeping online casinos relevant moving into the future. Something that many businesses and industries will strive to do moving into these new times.