Facial Recognition: An AI gateway to increasingly interactive, immersive, and secure gaming environments.

Unless you’ve been living off the grid for the past decade – and taking your

holidays on the dark side of the moon – you know that artificial intelligence and

machine learning technologies are being applied to the casino-and-gaming industry

as much, or more, than they’re being applied to any other industry on earth. The

reasons are obvious. Casino-and-gaming is stunningly lucrative—an industry

worth over $50 billion a year in the US alone. But it’s also an industry in which

change is a constant and in which innovation, and the slightest competitive

advantages, can mean the difference between mere survival on the one hand and

domination of industry rivals on the other. For those in the casino-and-gaming

space, it’s impossible to ignore AI’s power.

In truth, AI has been exerting significant influence within the industry for some

time, particularly through advances in facial recognition, statistics and probability

and virtual reality. But of these three main areas, facial recognition is one that is

perhaps the most interesting over the long term and the one poised to deliver the

biggest potential advantages, particularly when it comes to marketing and customer

satisfaction. Facial recognition technologies are set to deliver a far more

interactive, far more satisfying gaming experience to customers, principally

through value-added services like member rewards recognition and the creation of

virtual environments, as well as vastly-improved gaming security. Profound, AI-

driven change is, at this point, an inevitability.

Member Rewards Recognition

First, let’s take a look at how facial recognition technologies effectively streamline

member rewards recognition, or the customer loyalty programs that have become

so central to how casinos maximize revenues. It should come as no surprise to

anyone that, just as frequent consumers of alcohol make up the bulk of the profits

enjoyed by breweries, distilleries and retail outlets, high-frequency gamblers are

responsible for up to two-thirds of all casino-and-gaming profits. Knowing this,

casinos and others in the industry make a point of rewarding players who play

often, assigning them various “levels” of loyalty and awarding them a range of

perks and privileges. Ironically, what is now a vast, complex system of rewards

began life as a fairly simple attempt to give something back to particularly loyal

customers. Today, customers, depending on how much they play, can enjoy “free”

periods of play in a casino, free accommodations, and free food and drinks.

Yet, for casinos and others in the industry, these loyalty programs – however much

they contribute to profitability long term – are challenging to administer short term

and soak up a great deal of time, energy and resources. Facial recognition software,

by automating the process of validating identity, offers the potential to do away

with these costs in one fell swoop. The end result is (potentially) a full-immersive,

interactive gaming environment in which the customer’s every whim is catered to

seamlessly. Assuming the gambler continues to spend, the need to interrupt his or

her experience of the gaming environment disappears entirely; as anyone who has

ever gambled knows, this tends to facilitate longer gambling sessions and,

eventually, more losses than wins. It is said that the house always wins –

eventually – and in many ways facial recognition technologies make this even

more likely, by making the gaming experience so pleasant and so immersive for

players that they have trouble pulling themselves away.

While not a new technology per se, facial recognition has become exponentially

more powerful in recent years. Needless to say, the use of facial recognition by

state actors and security services to clamp down of dissent is worrying, but in free

societies – and in the private marketplace – its ability to target individuals as a

means of providing them with increasingly personalized (and usually superior)

services is immensely valuable in economic terms. For companies in casino-and-

gaming, “facial recognition registration” means that they can assign their

customers a unique identifier that allows them to more accurately identify those

customers’ needs and desires. Fleeting joy, fear, anger, frustration, and desire,

expressed in the face, can offer clues to casino operators and others about what

their customers want and/or need. Key facial features like the size of the nose, the

thickness of the eyebrows, and the slope of the face – along with height and

assessed weight – can be used to establish an extremely secure “ID” within the

gaming space that can be tied seamlessly to member rewards, VR interactions,

gaming preferences, etc. In short, facial recognition allows service providers within

the industry to assess the needs of their clients more easily and cheaply, satisfy

those needs faster, and ultimately leave customers more satisfied and more likely to

return.

Many of these capacities, particularly with respect to identifying and responding to

customer emotions (and also their level of engagement) remain in the R&D phase,

but according to a recent report in the UNLV Gaming Law Review, it is video game

developers who are at the forefront of advances in this area. Game developer

Affectiva, for example, has been working on a technology it calls ‘Emotion AI’ to

respond to users’ emotions in something approaching real time. According to the

study, Affectiva’s Emotion Software Development Kit employs a webcam or other

recording device to “identify key landmarks on the face [and] then analyze pixels

in those regions to classify facial expressions,” after which, “combinations of these

facial expressions are...mapped to emotions.” Affectiva is based partly in Boston,

but the fact that the University of Nevada, Las Vegas – set in the world’s gambling

capital – has taken such a keen interest in the company’s work testifies to the level

of interest that casino-and-gaming companies have in this area of research. Rival

firms like Cogito, Observe.AI, Kynamics and Balto are doing similar work.

Gaming Security

Gaming security is another area in which facial recognition can make a major

contribution. It’s no secret, after all, that gambling centers like Las Vegas attract

their own share of cheats, ne’er do wells, and outright criminals. Thus the issue of

security in the casino-and-gaming industry—physical and financial—is paramount.

So when table games like Poker, Roulette, and BlackJack can restrict entry to

players who’ve passed a facial scan, and only players who’ve passed a facial scan,

it’s bound to inspire confidence in all other players, as well as a general willingness

in average players to carry more money, spend more money, stay longer, and,

broadly speaking, become more invested in the games they’re playing. The appeal

of gambling will inevitably broaden. By using facial recognition databases to

screen players, casinos and related businesses not only protect themselves; they

protect their clientele, and players are bound to repay this effort with increased

loyalty. Facial recognition technologies will inevitably be installed across casino

floors, in accommodation centers and eateries, and in and around casino grounds.

Some might suggest that this creates a space where “no one can hide” and where

individual liberties take a backseat to top-down control, but there’s no question that

the vast majority of those who frequent the big casinos in Las Vegas, Macau, and

Monte Carlo are less fearful of the cameras and the AI than they are of petty

criminals, money launderers, identity thieves and others.

Facial Recognition and Virtual Reality

Also coming soon are real-time games that mimic virtual reality television, and

video games in which customers use a personal avatar – constructed from

biometric data gleaned in part from facial recognition – to explore digital versions

of casinos (or other gaming locations) from the comfort of their home or hotel

room. While, for the moment, these developments fall into the category of “coming

soon,” it has also been determined that a number of companies are rapidly gaining

the ability to develop these sorts of VR environments by blending together current

facial recognition technologies, blockchain technologies, advances in gaming, and

elements of what’s been labeled the “metaverse.”

The Future

The future, for facial recognition in the casino-and-gaming space, involves all of

the advances noted above and many more to boot. For now, however, the focus is

on improved security and improved services through instant (or near-instant) ID

verification. The role of blockchain, augmented reality, and the metaverse is less

clear for the time being, but it’s bound to become clearer in very short order. The

technologies that have been developed and the direction in which today’s most

important technology companies have set themselves suggest that facial

recognition technologies in the casino-and-gaming space are bound to grow in

importance over time. By helping make the customer experience increasingly

seamless, increasingly secure, and increasingly satisfying, interactive, and

immersive, facial recognition is set to prove a major boon to casinos and customers

alike. This is exactly what makes the technology so fascinating, of course. It

represents a “win” for all industry stakeholders and a technology that, if

implemented wisely, can help take casino-and-gaming to the next level.