VR will revolutionise the Asian market

For kids who grew up watching science fiction movies in the ’80s and ’90s, the advent of attainable, commercial virtual reality is just about the most exciting thing ever to happen. After all, we’ve been promised this for 30 years. It’s been prophesied in the films of David Cronenberg, and fantasised about in everything from Tron to The Lawnmower Man to The Matrix.

Often in these movies virtual reality was a thing to be feared; they are cautionary tales in which real human experience is eroded and devalued as it becomes subsumed by virtual technology. Or something.

Now that technology has caught up with the fantasy, though, it’s clear to those who have experienced it that virtual reality is truly a thing of wonder. With virtual reality, seeing is believing – literally. And if you haven’t experienced it in all its immersive glory, you’ll just have to take my word for it.

But we’re talking about so much more than just a virtual playground. VR is likely to be a disruptive and eventually pervasive technology, a new platform that has the potential to fundamentally reconfigure the digital world and change the way we do business.

Time for change

The online gambling world will inevitably be transformed by VR over the next five to 20 years, depending, of course, on the speed of mass market adoption (and since we’ve all been waiting for this since the ’80s, we predict adoption will happen quickly).

On its simplest level, VR ramps-up a game’s engagement levels and creates exciting new social aspects. This creates new opportunities for multi-player slots tournaments, for example, that offer high levels of interaction.

Social gaming is possibly one of the best use cases for virtual reality, because social interaction is what the new medium is all about. This could be good news for the Asian market, which tends to prefer interactive live dealers over two-dimensional games powered by untrusted random number generators.

For Asian gamblers, the ability to “step inside” an online casino and engage with dealers is likely to be a hugely attractive prospect. We are perhaps three or four years away from creating the kind of VR experience where a person’s VR avatar will be a truly lifelike 3D representation of themselves.

Soon, though, we will be left with the impression that we have truly “met” a person after we have encountered them in a virtual space. Operators, then, can bid farewell to television studios and 24-streams – all a dealer will need to get a game is a pair of goggles.

But it won’t just be the dealers who are strapping on the goggles and stepping inside the casino.

Enhanced experience

There will be casino support agents roaming the virtual floor too, and this will really transform the customer service relationship, upping the level of trust so highly demanded by Asian gamblers. Affiliate managers, meanwhile, will be able to “physically” bring their high-profile clients to the casino and socialise with them while there, handing out bonuses or introducing them to the newest games.

Even the casino manager can be present in the virtual space, although he may spend most of his time “upstairs” holding meetings with suppliers.

The first adopters of virtual reality will likely be the millennial generation, a demographic to whom VR is going to appeal greatly due to its immersivity and interactivity. This is a generation that eschews traditional gambling games in favour of social gaming and eSports, so VR online casinos are likely to embrace those aspects in their games – again, a fact that will be appreciated in Asia, from where eSports emerged.

In the meantime, table games like the perennial Asian favourite baccarat will work well in VR, not just because of their higher levels of social interaction, but also greater interaction with the immersive environment, through grabbing cards and chips, and so on.

Ultimately, however, while it’s fun to imagine the virtual reality casinos of the near future, what they might look like 20 years from now is anyone’s guess. The great thing about virtual reality is that you can use it to create pretty much anything, so the chances are the online casino games of the future will be a strange mix of eSports and gambling, in which you are starring in your own arcade game, doing battle in some futuristic arena.

In which case, maybe Tron had it right all along.