2015 has most definitely been the year where everyone and their mother got excited about virtual reality. In a way, we’ve had VR for many years (who else remembers the Virtual Boy), but for the first time in history we’ve got VR that actually friggin’ works! Putting on a VR headset truly feels like you’re stepping into another world, to the point where we’ve now got numerous videos on YouTube of people getting so excited while inside a virtual reality that they’re downright screaming when something happens to them. Yes, virtual reality has finally become impressive enough to trick our brains into believing we’re actually flying, or diving underwater, or dodging a dinosaur stampede. And while Oculus started this whole trend, numerous developers have announced their own VR projects in 2015, including HTC and Sony. But there’s one question on the mind of every gambler – can we possibly harness this technology to improve online gambling?
As some of you may recall, recently famous casino games provider Microgaming managed to scoop the award for Digital Gaming Innovation at the 2015 Global Gaming Awards. What you may not know is that their innovation of the year was precisely a game where you could play roulette in virtual reality. And while we’re most likely not going to be seeing that particular game hit online casinos any time soon (at least not until virtual reality technology starts being adopted on a massive scale by the consumers), just the fact that big developers are experimenting in that direction is enough to give gamblers looking for a new experience hope for the future.
So, what kind of games can we expect to play in VR in the next 10 years? Well, obviously roulette is on the way, and it seems like the best candidate for virtual reality. Roulette is, by its nature, a game with a very strong physical presence, so being able to put on the goggles and see a huge roulette table right in front of you should be one of the most fun experiences you could have in our hypothetical VR casino. Blackjack could also be fun, but that one would probably be more of a novelty than anything else – I can see nothing that VR can add to blackjack as a whole. But slots are probably going to benefit the most out of the VR experience. With a big enough budget, you could be transported to an entirely new world when playing slots. Imagine playing “The Avengers” slot by Playtech and seeing Iron Man fly by and blast aliens away, or imagine playing “South Park” while the kids are hanging around you and shouting profanities whenever you lose. The possibilities are literally endless, and it’ll be up to clever developers to discover them all.