In this interview with CalvinAyre.com’s Becky Liggero, Alessandro Fried of Btobet discusses how augmented reality can transform the gambling industry.
The year 2016 will probably be remembered as the year when augmented reality has really taken off and become known to every household.
Thanks to the success of mobile AR games – such as Niantic’s Pokemon GO – many game developers are starting to see the commercial viability of augmented reality. It also paved the way for everyone to become familiar with the concept of the novel gameplay ideas in mobile gaming.
Even the gambling industry is catching the fever that is augmented reality.
At the recent Summit of iGaming Malta, game technology provider BtoBet introduced to “Simone” – a virtual avatar – to the public. With the use of mobile phones, “Simone” was able to interact with the people during the convention.
“Simone today is interacting with operators so they are introducing what could be the futures,” Alessandro Fried of BtoBet told CalvinAyre.com. “With the players, [It] would be to provide virtual avatar, virtual digital systems that will be automatically activated by push notifications, by logo tagging and so on.”
To understand how augmented reality will work for the gambling industry, Fried pointed out that operators must learn about Omni-channel and the opportunity that it brings for retailers. He also emphasizes the importance to approach the players with an intelligent platform and services.
“The opportunity for retailers [in Omni-channel] is to move not just the online for different channel, but to move with a different approach,” he said. “That [approach] is the player-centric approach, where the retailers will not just provide themselves bets but will provide to the players a different kind of sportsbook and gaming experience.”
Fried claims that their company is working a lot to provide advanced technologies and advance intelligent tools to manage the business and to be able to manage the data.
In mobile, he said that BtoBet is launching a new functionality in mobile called recommendation engine, which has the ability to analyze in real time the players’ behaviors, and to provide the players direct product when it comes to casinos or events when it comes to betting about what interest them in.
“Now it’s time to give to the operators the opportunity to acquire this information from the players, delivering a new kind of services. So the interest, the tool extend the services to the mobile,” Fried said. “And we’ve spoken before of augmented reality, some nice games like bonus hunting that will be added as marketing tools for the operators.”
When asked about how the gaming industry could take advantage of this type of technology, Fried said they should try to optimize their services and the access of the services.
“If you can imagine that some websites offer more than 2,000 casino games, hundreds of thousands of events is becoming – when we talk about mobile – very difficult for players to access this huge quantity of data and here were recommendation engine can be very efficient,” he said.
