Member Article

Virtual Entertainment: Are VR Truly the Future?

Virtual reality is often credited as the “next big thing” in the world of entertainment. Of course, VR headsets can offer their users a never-before-seen level of immersion, hard to match by anything else currently available. Virtual reality will surely impact a series of entertainment forms beyond video games. Yet these forms of entertainment will have to change themselves to be able to make the best use of VR - they will have to reach a new level of interactivity since their consumers will probably want to do more than just sit idly and absorb the fun thrown at them in a virtual world.

Among the forms of entertainment said to be changed by VR is that of remote gambling. Microgaming, the software developer behind the massive game library at wild jack online casino, has already built a state-of-the-art virtual reality app, called VR Casino, that won the Digital Gaming Innovation of the Year at the Global Gaming Awards 2016. Yet not the Wild Jack, nor any other internet casino has rolled out the final product at this time. The reason for this is simple: VR is not widespread enough yet to justify it.

The problem lies in the way people play casino games online. As opposed to real life casinos, where people spend hours at a time, online casino games have a strongly casual nature. The average Wild Jack player bets sporadically - about once every two weeks, as a study conducted by the Harvard Medical School’s Division on Addiction in 2014 shows. From the usage’s point of view, the games at the Wild Jack Casino are much closer to social games like Candy Crush than to those available in land-based casinos. With such a short time dedicated to casino games, the rollout of a virtual reality solution is not justified.

Besides, VR as a technology is not widespread enough at this time to make a true impact. Nate Mitchell, Oculus’ VP of product, would not divulge the number of Oculus Rift headsets at an event last year, suggesting that the spread of the product - and the technology itself - is slow enough not to offer the company anything to brag about. Which is OK, by the way - nobody expected VR to take the market by storm like smartphones did a decade ago. It’s a marathon, not a sprint - the technology does well, and it will stay around for long enough to become an integral part of our lives. It might not take a year - more like a decade - but soon we’ll see enough serious VR headsets to justify a wide rollout of a variety of virtual entertainment options, including VR casinos.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Gagan Chhatwal .