The Metaverse is still very much a concept and different people have radically different ideas about how it could affect all kinds of areas of our lives. We know that Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fully believes in the idea – he even changed the name of his company from Facebook to Meta a little while back. Note that Facebook owns Oculus, the company who are producing some of the most advanced virtual reality headsets you can buy right now, so I think it’s fair to say he has a vested interest! If you have been reading the casino news recently, however, you must surely have seen this metaverse concept mentioned numerous times. So what is it all about?
The Concept
The idea behind the 3is that we will all “live” within a fully digital realm where a virtual version of ourselves will exist at all times. The Metaverse may be accessed via virtual reality, augmented reality, or simply viewing it on the screen of one of your existing devices.
The idea behind it is that you may choose to follow a different life path inside the metaverse to what you have in your real life. Perhaps you’ll spend a lot of your time in the Metaverse studying hard, maybe you will even have a job there, or, more likely, you will want to attend events that you simply could never get to in real life and experience them in full virtual reality. Of course, the biggest use for this technology is in gaming, and online gambling is a major subset of the gaming industry, so let’s take a look at how the Metaverse could change online gambling.
The Metaverse & Online Gambling
Believers in the concept insist that the metaverse can fix four of the biggest problems we currently have with online gambling – these are:
- Game Selection
- Concern Over Payment Methods
- Playing Posture
- Traditional Gambling Characteristics are being lost
Let’s deal with each of these four suggestions on their own, as it seems to many people that some of these suggestions have a little more merit than others!
Game Selection
The size of online casino game libraries has grown to epic proportions in recent years – the highest quality casinos have thousands of games available to play. Finding something new that you like has become a challenge now, and many players tend to stick to the developers or games that they already know.
It’s difficult to imagine how being in a virtual environment will improve this situation – much of the talk in the industry at the moment completely sidesteps the original point and sidetracks to questions about computing power and will our machines be capable of handling so many games inside the metaverse – that sounds more like a problem than a solution to me!
Concern Over Payment Methods
Most people are fairly comfortable with making online purchases these days, and depositing money at an online casino isn’t any different from any other purchase you need to make. At the same time, our Metaverse personalities will (hopefully) be fully secured and our payment information will be literally just a click away, as it will already be stored in the profile of our virtual “avatar”. So yes, I do believe that the metaverse will make depositing and withdrawing from online casinos easier – but is it really necessary?
Playing Posture
For me, this is the biggie – I think we are all guilty of not truly having the perfect ergonomic setup at home, so we end up hunched over our laptops or sitting at desks that are not truly comfortable. If we can just kick back on our sofas and use some sort of controller to play blackjack, poker, and slots, all inside the Metaverse, that sounds like a huge plus to me!
Think about it – you don’t need to be sitting in front of your phone, or your TV, hunched over your laptop, or sat at your desk – just put on your headset, wander into your favorite casino, and away you go. Are our current gaming controllers really up to this task, however? The Oculus headset does have its own set of controllers, but those look even less likely to be useful for logging in to an online casino and spinning some slots. I think there is still work to do here, but this could well be an advantage that will sell the technology to many people.
Traditional Gambling Characteristics are being lost
It’s certainly true that playing casino games at home on your own is a completely different experience from visiting a casino – but can the metaverse change this? Sure, we may get to see our “friends” whilst we are out gambling and possibly even sit down to play blackjack or poker with them, but is that enough?
Advocates of the metaverse believe that the latest headsets with detailed facial tracking will be able to express calls at the poker table in a way that has never been possible online before – a good thing for some, sure, but certainly not for others. That being said if you are a poker player you are likely to be the one reading your opponent’s tells rather than losing all your chips by doing something stupid!
Summing Up
The metaverse is going to take a long time to build, but once it gets there, there seems little doubt that it will have some benefits for online gamblers. Whether the current predictions are correct…. That is difficult to say. Some of them certainly are, and poker players will utterly love being able to see their opponent’s faces in real-time., just like in a live game. Does this mean we will just see a bunch of guys in hoodies and shades, wearing earphones inside the Metaverse next? Come on, we all know it’s coming!
