Live casino has evolved significantly in the last few years. Advancements in the technology that powers live streams and the way in which players can access them from their mobile devices means that professionally dealt tables are now in many cases available to play from anywhere, at any time, via their browser.
Design Decisions Driving the Mobile Shift
Mobile-first design has become central to how operators build a platform for an online live casino UK players can navigate intuitively on smaller screens, with gesture controls and adaptive layouts reducing friction between a user and a live dealer table. Reducing the user’s cognitive load when interacting with products on smaller mobile screens in fast-paced, interactive environment such as live dealer games is critical to keeping them engaged. By implementing key touch interface design principles within their offerings, operators can see tangible reductions in user drop-off during the start of sessions.
The Gambling Commission describe mobile gambling trends based on online gambling participation using handheld devices such as mobiles, tablets etc. Within these trends there is stated to be consistent year on year increase of participation and specifically live casino participation is increasing at a rate greater than participation in traditional virtual table games in the last reporting periods.
Streaming Infrastructure Behind the Experience
The technical foundation of Live Casino is the WebRTC streaming standard (Web Real-Time Communication). WebRTC is a protocol standard for real-time web communication, which was issued by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for enabling real-time video and audio communication without any browser plugin in the browser. A card dealt by the croupier in a studio in Riga is instantly displayed on the player’s screen – within less than half a second.
Latest performance figures for the iPhone app on the latest iOS powered hardware have shot up another notch. In addition to the Apple platform features of hardware-accelerated video decoding and adaptive bitrate management to ensure the optimal stream quality on various network connections, the iOS mobile experience runs smoothly on mobile phone and tablet networks with variable connection stability.
Where Immersive Technology Fits Next
A BBC News Technology report on the emerging area of immersive entertainment technology within online gaming identified AR and VR gaming as the next step for operators. Of these there are a number of suppliers already testing out a range of new and highly interactive online casino type experiences which are delivered as digital downloads and provide a highly immersive gaming experience through an interactive 3D experience where the live dealer is overlaid with a spatial interface allowing for new highly interactive experiences to be played.
Researchers tracked some of the latest data.ai insights into the mobile gaming market. The number of downloads for casino-style games, as part of a wider overview of the state of mobile entertainment, has continued to rise – and will presumably do so even more as devices increase in capability to render more complex and interactive formats.
A Technology Story Still In Progress
Live casino games are increasingly becoming the domain of software engineering as much as they are for the hospitality and game design industries. As more advanced live streaming protocols are developed for the sector and better quality mobile hardware becomes more prevalent, the distinctions between playing at a real casino and playing on a screen of a phone may be rapidly being reduced in very tangible terms.
