Virtual Reality Could be Financial Sanity for Future Casinos
I
Jeff Lande, Founder of Lucky VR, chats with Damien Connelly
’m in the bonus feature. I need to collect eggs. Dinosaur-sized eggs. It’s even more challenging because I also need to beat a T.rex. I can see it, I can hear it, I can feel it. If my smell sense was triggered right about now, I would also think I could smell it. My brain is telling me the T.rex is real and that it’s right in front of me. My heart has started to beat faster. A Pterodactyl flies overhead, making me duck. “Wow!” I could equally be sitting at a virtual table game, or in a virtual VIP lounge looking out the window at a cityscape designed to look like Singapore, London, the Las Vegas Strip, or anywhere your imagination can take you. I could watch a live sports event being broadcast on the ‘big screen’ in my virtual venue; the Mayweather-
16
Pacquiao fight would be experienced in a totally immersive manner if I was watching it on a VR headset. I could wager on the sports event if legal in the jurisdiction. You’ve not experienced ‘immersive’ until you’ve tried virtual reality (VR). Watching the recently released Jurassic World even in 3D has nothing on VR. This is one reason Facebook paid $2 billion to acquire Oculus VR. Indeed, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes VR could become our main way to interact with computers; and what’s a slot or ETG if not a computer? Online, social and mobile gambling channels are also computer environments. Major video gaming companies from Sony to Microsoft and Ubisoft are developing products for VR, and tech giants such as Google and Samsung