Since its inception, the gambling industry has found ways to take advantage of new developments in technology in order to ensure that it remains relevant and accessible. It’s now easier to gamble than ever before with every smartphone serving as a virtual casino.
Although the gambling industry has adopted digital forms of gambling, traditional brick and mortar casinos are still a regular feature in many cities and towns. However, many of these establishments now have digital gambling machines. Some of these machines have been controversial, even being described as “the crack cocaine of gambling.” In response, the industry has since adopted best practice guidelines which are aimed at protecting vulnerable customers. Below are some of the technologies which are transforming the gambling industry:
Online Gambling
The gambling industry has had to rapidly adapt to respond to the rise of the internet. Fortunately, it has done so skillfully and successfully. Because gambling involves simple calculations and the application of random chance, computers have been able to do it very easily and efficiently. Because only a small amount of data needs to be exchanged between a player and a server, online gambling was possible even in the very early days of the internet. While there were initially concerns from some corners that making gambling accessible from the home would lead to a spike in cases of gambling addiction, this fortunately does not appear to be the case.
Online poker has historically been the most common form of online gambling, but there are now digital versions of most casino games, and even scratch cards. At first, many customers were wary of gambling online, fearing that hackers would find such systems much easier to break into and cheat than a thief at a real casino. Fortunately, online gambling sites have proven resilient to efforts to cheat, although there are still cases where it does occur.
Smartphones
The advent of smartphones has made gambling truly portable and it is now possible to gamble from just about anywhere. Services are available through both apps and web browsers and encompass every form of gambling that one could envisage.
Smartphones can not only download apps for specific casino games, but they can also access websites. An increasing number of online gambling sites are being designed to have mobile compatible versions that are automatically served to users if the website detects they are browsing on a phone.
Security
The nature of security threats to casinos has changed as technology has evolved; for example, there was a gang operating across Asia who used a tiny, fibre optic camera combined with a computer that could process the image to record the riffle of a deck of cards and therefore know the order they would be dealt in. Consequently, casinos have changed their approach to rooting out cheats. There are now camera systems under development which contain an AI that is capable of establishing whether behaviour is suspicious or not.
New technological innovations are seized upon by the gambling industry and, with VR on the horizon, the possibilities for future gambling technology are endless.
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