Virtual reality online poker has arrived. For those who can’t or don’t wish to visit a brick-and-mortar casino, you can now have the experience of one while sitting in your pajamas and eating Triscuits.
“Casino VR: Poker” is the first app of its kind that will allow players to experience a fully functional, multi-player poker game rendered in completely immersive virtual reality, provided they have the hardware, of course.
With Oculus Rift, the world’s first commercially available VR headset, due to go on sale within a matter of months, virtual reality in now becoming very much a reality.
“Casino VR: Poker” is a play-money game, currently in beta testing, that transplants you into a large fully explorable casino lobby with multiple poker tables to choose from. Players assume avatars that can interact with others in the game, utilizing head tracking and spatial voice chat so they can talk socially with fellow players.
But does it allow you to virtually ogle the cocktail waitress?
Exciting for Poker
A slew of games of all kinds are already here, of course, created exclusively for this brave new world medium. Don one of the headsets and you can be transported anywhere that a software engineer’s imagination will take you.
But the idea of poker and VR is an interesting one. Many believe that VR that will work best in games where there is an emphasis on social interaction, and poker, as the most social of casino games, could be the category winner there.
As the poker industry looks for new ways to reinvent and rejuvenate itself, could it be that VR is the answer? The possibilities are tantalizing.
VR will make it possible, for example, to create TV-style final table environments online, and will even enable friends of final-tablists to sit in the audience and cheer them on.
Missing Link
The games will likely appeal to social gamers and real-money gamers alike. Alexandre Tomic, whose company Slots Million has created the first-ever virtual reality real-money online casino said in an interview with CalvinAyre.com recently that he believes that the new medium will provide the missing link between social and real-money players.
“Today we have two different sectors in online gambling. We have the social players, who don’t play for money but who share a lot of their experiences, and we have the real-money players, who play but they don’t talk a lot about it,” said Tomic.
“We’re going to able to design a virtual place where these people can meet and play together. So social players will be looking at the real-money players to see how they play.”
Adoption Will Take Time
If virtual reality online poker does take off, it might not happen overnight, though. VR goggles will cost around $350 when they hit the market, but you’ll need a high-spec gaming PC to use them, which will inflate the costs to around $1,500 minimum.
As initial adoption may be slow, early VR online poker games could suffer from a lack of a decent player pool, as Tomic noted to CalvinAyre.
“I don’t think we’ll see a rise in virtual reality in gaming next year,” he said. “I don’t think it’s even going to come in 2017. As Mark Zuckerberg said, he believes in it but it’s maybe five, ten years away. There’s really no rush to invest in it [at the moment] but you really do have to watch it like milk on fire.”
Does milk catch fire? We’ve never heard it does, but we’re guessing VR will be lighting up down the road.
