The Rise of Live Dealer Games: Bringing the Casino to Your Home

Since forever, merchants have known well of people’s desire for instant gratification and escapism. Gambling is as old as dice as are alcohol and other ways to party, thus forming little venues people can gather around and submit to their most surface-level desires. Technology has completely reinvented where to find these vice atmospheres and how easy it is to indulge. As soon as social media popped up, people started throwing dice and wagering boldly online.

Originally this was at their computers, allowing people who had very little time in the day, had difficulty walking, and other restrictions to have some fun in their living rooms. Then this spread to their cell phones, not only playing at home but being able to play when they were at their daughter’s soccer practice, when they sat waiting at the DMV, and on the subway. Needless to say, the availability of this experience continued to expand to the underserved. There was only one problem though, that age-old party atmosphere where everybody let loose was lacking in ordinary blackjack and craps games online. People craved that wonderland venue where for a moment none of their problems existed. That’s where live casinos came in.

The Venue

One day you’re sitting at home. Maybe you’re just waiting for your spouse to arrive to take you to the pumpkin patch or you’re a retiree and you have free time. You turn on your tablet on the couch and you find yourself right in front of a handsomely dressed, witty blackjack dealer on your screen standing behind a velvety table. This man is the star of the experience along with the cards and the other people in the chat. His job is to be helpful and provide you hope and encouragement, along with some quick little jokes to help stoke that game atmosphere and social camaraderie.

All of the cards are zeroed in on with numerous cameras stationed all around the live dealer room. They actually use advanced optical character recognition to translate the dealer’s actions and the cards put down. Technology like this is used in a bunch of different ways today. Sick of having to remember logins and passwords, people now sign in using Face ID for Baji login and bank cards are scanned by cameras instead of having to enter the digits manually.

Screens

It all then gets translated to graphic form and displayed on the player’s screen, immediately updated. Buttons lie on the screen that allow you to hit or stay. Low-latency is a must. Cameras pan and zoom as if it’s a sports broadcast.

Other people in the chat help give you suggestions, as does the dealer. They help lift you up. If you’re playing craps, people usually don’t bet the don’t pass line. The whole experience feeds into people’s need to join a group in real life. Just card screens are a lot colder.

Game Control Units

You would think that camera recognition is enough, however, there are glitches that could occur, which is why there is a Game Control Unit handling any goofs that the relays allow. It also encodes the live video stream in real time. Sometimes though, you don’t merely have cards on the table. You could have a roulete wheel or dice. There are specially installed sensors for those. That guarantees accuracy and speed as well.

Augmented Reality

The original intent of live casinos is to replicate a casino environment, using a real casino room to broadcaste. But some take advantage of the virtual environment to go a step further, using a green screen. That way, they can render whatever type of environment they want. They could be standing on the edge of a cliff or outer space if they want. This is the same technology TV broadcasters use.

Special effects are added in during the game too. Lightning Roulette uses random multipliers flashing on the screen added to numbers. Game show formats are big where spinning wheels get surrounded by cash signs, clovers, and hearts glowing. Numbers count down on the screen giving people the experience like being on live TV – quite entertaining. They also include bonus rounds with side bets appearing as glowing problems and confetti dropping down when they win.

VR

In this exploding trend, you are transported to the casino instead of it coming to you. This of course requires a headset, and not everybody wants to invest in one, nor do their eyes feel comfortable having to try to focus the whole time. But in this case, they can actually physically walk around or use a control stick to create the illusion of walking around and actually approach different tables. The realism is dumb-founding.

They feel like they’re actually sitting at the Monte Carlo or in Atlantic City, wherever they choose to visit. They could even go to a gambling hall in Narnia, meanwhile, everybody else has an avatar. So the possibilities of make-believe here are endless. Yet, the bets are of course real. They can talk to other players using their voices and actually nod and move the characters body.

Yet another special thing about this is you can meet with your friends in this virtual world and it actually seems as though you’ve actually met with them. This is a special opportunity to reunite with friends and loved ones in an unparalleled way.

Popularity

The ascension of these live casinos which began in the 2000s is only beginning still. Most people in the world cannot afford computers and even families rely on smartphones for doing any Internet-related business. Many families even share their smartphones and many more are acquiring one for the first time or have yet to buy one. Indeed, that market is very far from saturated, so as they spread, so too will live gaming boom bigger and bigger.

In Europe, live casinos racked up 3.2 billion last year with an 8.7% CAGR. In North America, it’s 2.1 billion. Worldwide though, the market is valued at 32.94 and by 2033 it’s expected to hit 114.9 billion dollars. So clearly it’s on the up and up. Part of the reason for that too is a trend toward gambling regulation liberalization. It’s getting opened up more and more, especially in certain resorts for foreigners specifically but also for the locals in many places but with an iron grip on how they run them.

Two other things are blasting this growth to the extent it’s going. One if 5G Internet, which blows the 4G predecessor out of the water in terms of how fast data can load on it and how fault tolerant it is. Then there’s cloud computing, which overcomes device limitations. If someone has a really cheap smartphone that barely loads things, that’s not a problem when operating games processed on the casino’s own cloud. The only deterrent beyond that point could be bad Internet.