Imagine that it’s 2022, and you’ve just sat down in front of a slot machine, one of many hundreds, in a swanky casino in Las Vegas. Before you can get started with your game though, your name pops up on the screen, allowing you to personalize your experience on the casino floor.
This is what the future holds for casinos and gambling, and it is not too far away. In fact, many top real online casino brands have already implemented some form of facial recognition, and land-based casinos and other gambling locations are not far behind. The benefits of these systems are two-fold: they allow the user’s experienced to be customized, based on their spending and behavioral patterns, while the casinos are able to maintain security in a much better way. These facial recognition software work with some form of artificial intelligence (AI) in the background, which scans every feature of the user’s face to provide his or her identification and then personalize the gambling experience for them.
Such face recognition technologies have already seen the light of day in many countries, most notably in Australia, where one of the leading gambling providers installed cameras at some of its betting locations. The intention was to test its facial recognition software and its ability to identify underage gamblers. This is an extremely important potential use of such technology, as successful identification of potential underage gamblers would allow casinos and betting locations to solve a very real issue.
Another huge security implication is in recognizing players who have been previously banned by the casino, thus not allowing them to access the games and alerting the on-location security team as well. This will also reduce fraud, as users would not be able to impersonate other people and use their banking or credit card information to play at the slot machines. The face recognition technology would store each individual’s financial information, making it impossible for someone else to use the same credentials.
While these are the implications from a security point-of-view, there are also huge benefits for the casinos themselves. Facial recognition could be used to log in players instantly, especially high rollers and VIPs, and provide them with a personalized experience tailored to their preferences, based on their purchase and betting history which would be tracked and stored. For table games, such as poker and blackjack, facial recognition can identify high rollers quickly and alert pit managers.
As this area develops further, the key concern, as always, is around the privacy of customers and their data. Expanding data privacy laws make it difficult for such technologies to be implemented unilaterally – there will probably need to be some form of consent taken from the customer before recording his/her data, and it is this sort of challenge that needs to be tackled by the industry as a whole before facial recognition becomes commonplace.
