Casino on your desktop, browser and mobile – but what more?

Playing casino games on the internet has become a wide spread and popular activity in the last 20 years – this is how much has passed since the first real money online casino was launched. Online casinos are emerging even now, in this time of worldwide financial crisis, as the internet gambling industry – iGaming, as those involved call it – tends to maintain its profitability.

Online casinos have become more and more elaborate in the two decades since their first introduction. If at the beginning they were slow, resource-hungry packs of low fidelity graphics and sounds, some – not all – software packages have become more and more sophisticated, balanced and usable, with better graphics and sounds, and much better features – not to mention the games.

After a time people started to miss the one thing online casinos don’t have and real life ones do: personal contact. Developers had an answer to this issue, too – they have developed a thing called ‘live casino gaming’ – where players don’t have to make do with the impersonal, yet elaborate and precise random number generators anymore, having the chance to play their favorite game against a live dealer. These live dealers – usually young, attractive and female (wink!) – sit in a studio and deal classic casino games, like blackjack, roulette and baccarat – and smile, chat and encourage players during their playtime.

With the evolution of portable internet-capable devices, developers have discovered a new, unexplored platform to expand on. Mobile casino games – even live ones – started to emerge, with a complete set of features: touchscreen optimized interface, secure mobile payment solutions, specific promotions and games. Nowadays most online casinos have a mobile platform – most of them accessible through a mobile browser window, but some – including a live casino app made by Playtech – as native mobile apps to run on the latest mobile hardware. These mobile casinos are the latest step online casinos have taken in the course of their evolution.

I wonder what could be the next step in the evolution of online gambling – keeping in mind that the technology serving as a platform for every online activity is evolving before our very eyes. I can imagine a completely immersive casino experience, using either one of the wearable smart devices – like Google Glass or its competitors, for example – and a ‘desktop’ solution that can be used with one of the wearable gaming devices – like Oculus Rift. I can imagine voice commands used by casino software, gesture control for the poker and blackjack table, the use of bitcoins for depositing funds at casinos – and many other things, that I can’t include here, as the text I write could turn into a piece of science fiction.

Until that time, we can make do with what we have. I usually play at Platimul Play online casino – it has all my favorite games, some of them even on mobile, and live dealer games (including ones against dealers in Playboy bunny outfits) in case I want a smile besides my blackjack wins. Give them a try.