Inside the Private World of Virtual Poker Rooms

In the mid-2010s, a lot was expected from virtual reality tech, as people put lofty expectations on it amidst the debut of Oculus Rift. At that time, gamers were excited that affordable headsets would revolutionize home entertainment. However, that did not turn out to be the case for various reasons. One of the main ones was cost. Higher-end devices like Valve Index had a hefty price tag that most people were unwilling to pay. Things are much better today, but technical constraints and limited content have stunted the growth of this field, which has been alive in the consumer market sector since 1995, when Nintendo launched the Virtual Boy.

Online gambling was one of the industries that saw potential in VR. Microgaming, the pioneer of game of chance software, demonstrated a version of VR roulette in 2016 at that year’s ICE exhibition in Cancun, Mexico. Sadly, that product never made it to market. Playtech failed to launch a VR slot, as did NetEnt, which tried to create a VR version of its Gonzo’s Quest game. The failed Slot Millions VR casino also went under fairly quickly.

Poker seems to be the only type of gambling that has found some success with VR, probably because of its player-versus-player format and social nature. The game offers a unique mix of many things that translate well in digital environments where people can assume avatars. That said, real-money VR poker rooms are still not a mainstay, with most VR options revolving around social gambling. Below, we explore this landscape more deeply, uncovering what this tech offers to card gamblers.

Even though we said that VR headsets became commercially available in the mid-1990s when Nintendo started selling one, the concept of virtual reality can be traced back decades. In the 1930s, science fiction writer Stanley G. Weinbaum imagined headsets that could transport users into alternate realities. His ideas came to reality in the 1960s with the Sensorama, an invention that combined stereoscopic 3D visuals with stereo sound.

Poker online real money websites became a thing in 1998, although fun-play ones existed years prior in IRC chat rooms. At the beginning of the 2010s, Bitcoin Internet card rooms debuted, and now, this arena is larger than ever, set to pull in revenues of $11.4 billion by 2030.

In 2015, news broke about an online multiplayer platform called Casino VR Poker, developed by a San Francisco-based team, which offered Texas hold ’em and was gearing up to feature more casino games. The visuals Casino VR Poker provided were pretty good and still somewhat hold up today, and per its company’s co-CEO Hamza Siddiqui – poker is the ideal game to transport to VR environments because playing it with a mouse is much different than at a real-world venue. It takes out what makes this game so special and boils it down to a probability of numbers.

Unfortunately, Casino VR has not had much success. Three years later, PokerStars, one of the largest online poker operators, entered the VR space with PokerStars VR, a free-to-play social game made with the help of Lucky VR. It initially launched on Steam in a closed beta and is still active today, allegedly boasting half a million active users at one time. In 2023, it was rebranded to Vegas Infinite and expanded to include blackjack, roulette, and slots.

Currently, VR headsets can deliver resolutions of 2560x2560 per eye, and they use gyroscopes, accelerometers, and external sensors to track players’ movements in real time. That ensures precise interactions with a virtual environment. Hand controllers or glove-like peripherals enable natural gestures, which give VR poker the authentic feel that many players desire when playing remotely.

Like most top games, these apps or platforms, regardless of the technology used, exploit rendering engines like Unreal or Unity to create their detailed 3D settings. These are the norm for all top first-person shooters, offering great texturing and ambient lighting.

Nonetheless, we must say that most VR poker choices have not chosen realistic depictions of humans but cartoony avatars. That, for some, lowers immersion, but real-time voice chat, supported by spatial audio, makes up for this, as it makes conversations feel directional.

On the security front, we have randomized card shuffles and anti-cheat algorithms to maintain fairness, and ToxMod for chat monitoring to prevent toxicity.

It is a bit unsure, as most famous gambling brands seem reluctant to add it to their offering, probably feeling it will come at a hefty cost, but have a limited user pool. Going by predictions, the next-generation headsets, expected by 2027, promise lighter designs and lower pricing. Moreover, haptic gloves and full-body tracking could make chip handling and physical tells even more lifelike, which will surely go a long way in attracting more players, but there are no guarantees.

The small bursts of fame the ICE Poker venue enjoyed in the metaverse Decentraland did little to increase the popularity of avatar-based poker, and many operators feel the adoption of VR tech will bring about technical issues, such as server lag, tracking errors, or software bugs, that can disrupt gameplay and frustrate players.