Online gaming technology has come on leaps and bounds since the turn of the century. Although the first online gaming venture happened all the way back in 1978, it wasn’t until Sony introduced online multiplayers to the PlayStation 2 in the year 2000 that online gaming really began to take off. Only a couple of decades later the technology involved in bringing our favorite games to life has changed so much that it’s barely recognizable from its humble beginnings. Here are some of the most space-age advancements to happen to the online gaming industry in recent years.
Virtual and Augmented Reality
It used to be that the best online casinos could simply offer a good Return to Player Ratio and occasionally dish up new sign-up bonuses, but lately, things have become a great deal more competitive. With the proliferation of devices that can offer a virtual reality experience, some of the top casino providers have adapted their websites to make use of the technology at hand. Currently, four of the biggest competitors in the online casino sphere provide virtual reality formats for their games. Each of them allows users to wear a headset to interact with a 3D world that is created around them. There is such a vast number of virtual and augmented reality games nowadays that many of the new smartphones on the market have VR and AR capabilities. Thinking back to the year 2000, it would be hard to find many people who believed that we would have the ability to unlock a whole virtual world in our back pockets just twenty years later.
Facial Recognition
Facial recognition is by no means new technology, but the progress that has been made in its sophistication has been extraordinary over the past few years. Facial recognition technology is now widely used on laptops and smartphones for security measures. In this way, users can simply look at the screen of their device and they will be allowed access to it, removing the need for passwords, which can be guessed, and fingerprints (which if you were really desperate you could steal). As well as its obvious applications for security, online gaming companies have used facial recognition technology to create ever more lifelike avatars for people to play with. For those who remember the original Sims games, it could take hours to create something that looked even remotely like you, and even then there were thousands and thousands of people who had Sims that looked just like yours. Using facial recognition technology it is now possible to create a digital rendering of you that’s unlike anyone else’s.
Cloud Gaming
For gamers of the 90s, it used to be that heading to the store and picking out a new game was the most hotly anticipated day of the week. Whilst Cloud Gaming, or Gaming as a Service (GaaS) has not replaced physical game stores, many of us now simply log on and download whichever title we want without really thinking about it. The obvious benefits of this are not having to wait for a physical copy of a new release, and being able to keep games patched easily. However, one factor that we don’t often think about as consumers, is the fact that game sizes are no longer limited by the amount of space on a disk. It was quite common to buy a game that took 3 or 4 discs to install on a PC, but now all of that memory (and time!) is free, because everything can be streamed through the internet.
