Emerging Tech In Mobile Gaming
We’re already starting to see that mobile gaming is set to be the next big thing, over the past five years or so it has seen tremendous growth as the market audiences continues to change and invite a demographic that had typically not shown much interest in gaming before - this increasing interest has led to an emergence of two big tech changes that can be used for every day and for gaming purposes.
Augmented reality - The first big emerging tech change we’ve seen has been within augmented reality - it had already found big use through games like Pokémon GO which reached over one billion downloads across various marketplaces but we’re now starting to see it be used for other purposes. One of these recently shown has been to make everyday items like metro cards interactive by showing a 3d representation of a subway map through the camera and also open up some opportunities for what may be done within AR in the near future. With no additional hardware requirements that may increase cost or requirements with the device itself, we may quickly see the introduction of AR into our everyday lives as new discoveries and uses are found.
Virtual reality - The next big movement coming in gaming as a whole is within virtual reality as the hardware is starting to launch across all devices - it has been around on the PC for quite some time, but now both dedicated consoles and mobile devices are both starting to adopt VR tech. There is a challenge to overcome with this - namely being in the cost of the additional hardware required to use it through either a headset or hand controls, although costs have been coming down to allow the consumer market. There’s also the hardware requirement of the mobile devices themselves, running VR games isn’t particularly easy either and it may take a few more years for mobile devices to catch up and incorporate this tech.
With that being said we have already seen VR being adopted too - mobile casinos have been starting to introduce virtual reality to encourage a more social style of gameplay by recreating the feel of a real casino opening up a wide range of possibilities for games in this market - despite recent changes making some of these harder to access as regulation has been made mandatory through schemes such as Gamstop, a number of casino and betting sites are operating outside of the UK as these aren’t registered - with more users comes more investor interest too and it’s possible this may be the first sector in which VR becomes widespread.
It’s an exciting time for mobile gaming and the introduction of widespread AR and VR is just the start, modern smartphones have only been around in their current form for a decade or so and as such have a lot of room to grow yet - keep your eyes planted on the mobile tech market for gaming, there’s surely going to be changes to be seen yet.
