The online casino industry has always sought to stay ahead of the curve. After all, it took a combination of imagination and experimentation to even pioneer the notion of wholly digital internet casinos back in the early years of the 90s.
That commitment to innovation has kept the sector in good stead over the intervening decades, and today is no different. In 2024, it finds itself in the position of exploring a number of significant tech trends – each of which, by themselves, hold out the prospect of revolutionising the way people play and engage with table games in the 21st century.
Artificial Intelligence
The big tech story in the world today is, of course, the rise of sophisticated AI tools like ChatGPT. Trained on huge data sets, these models are capable of understanding context and making informed decisions and responses. Already the current generation of AI tools is being integrated into virtually every product you can imagine – from AI assistants to write your emails, to models that can fix-up your photography and even generate new work based on prompts.
The benefits AI offers to the iGaming sector are many and various. Naturally, an obvious option is to enlist AI as dealers in table games, something that is already being trialled in various online casinos.
But it’s the generative faculties of AI that has got the sector truly excited. An AI could easily iterate on existing game variants to produce whole new games on the fly, ensuring that even regular casino fans will always have something new and novel to explore.
AI’s potential for training is also something that is being looked at. By analysing your gameplay, a model would be able to identify areas for improvement, thus substantially helping to raise the level of play for even novice gamers.
DeFi Platforms
One of the biggest trends across the wider tech industry over the past decade has been the rise of decentralised finance, chiefly in the form of blockchain technologies and securities such as crypto-currencies.
Hailed by many as the future of money, crypto coins are a means of making transactions in a secure, anonymised and decentralised way. In light of this, many sectors have been eager to integrate the potential they promise into their existing payment processes. Finance, however, is a historically conservative sector, and thus this process of integration is taking place in a slow and incremental way.
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That is, aside from with respect to online casinos. With the iGaming sector’s forward thinking approach to embracing new tech, it should come as no surprise that there are a growing number of crypto-optimised casinos to choose from already trading online today. For example, CasinoBonusCA – a platform which furnishes users with competitive sign-up deals and welcome offers for leading gaming providers even has a dedicated directory for bitcoin casino Canada from which DeFi-partial casino aficionados from the region can take their selection from among a range of reputable digital venues.
Virtual Reality and the Metaverse
The metaverse is more than the brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg – it’s an all-encompassing concept akin to the classic idea of cyberspace. It’s a vision for the future of the internet, one where we’re all engaging through the medium of VR-optimized headsets. How far we are from that becoming a reality – if indeed it is destined to be – is hard to say. Consumer uptake on VR headsets remains relatively low, though with the recent fanfare surrounding Apple’s entry into the sector with the Vision Pro headset, that may soon change. After all, Apple has a good track record for validating novel technologies, from the smartphone to tablets and smart-watches.
If you’re already a proud owner of a VR headset, there are many VR enabled casinos and games out there to choose from today already. And while these remain isolated examples of an emergent technology, it’s feasible to envisage what an iGaming metaverse could look like in the coming years.
After all, who wouldn’t fancy the idea of navigating the digital equivalent of the Las Vegas strip, with a host of casinos all populating a virtual space you can navigate and enjoy with your friends. Suffice to say, while there are no certain timelines on the emergence of such an offering, it’s reasonable to assume it’s something the sector is already eagerly exploring.
