Many of us love video gaming. We might enjoy an hour or two in the evenings after work, or a quick five minutes on one of our favorite games during lunch. While many enjoy video gaming, very few of us know a great deal about how it all works.
Have you ever wondered what stops a virtual roulette wheel from turning or lets you see the Pokémon on your phone screen? What about how your gestures are picked up by the Wii console, or how come now you can play a game on the Cloud, when before you had to go to the shop and buy a disc? If any of these questions are familiar then you’re in luck, because we’re going to explain it all right now.
Random Number Generators
First on the list are random number generators, or from this point on RNGs. These use a seed number, put it through an equation, and come out with a ‘random’ number. There are two types of RNGs – true and pseudo. A true RNG gets its seed number from a random event, like the coordinates of where lightning strikes, or the digits from the breaking down of an atom.
A pseudo RNG gets its seed number from an almost random set of data, in the case of roulette it could be from the milliseconds between clicking to play the roulette game and hovering over the chat window. A pseudo RNG is usually sufficient for casino gaming at www.bodog.eu/casino/blackjack-games. It helps ensure that every game is fair for the casino and the customer. Plus, it manages to do so in a minute space of time, something a true RNG couldn’t do. TRNGs take a long time to find random data, meaning they’re used only when necessary, usually for something scientific.
Cloud Gaming
Cloud gaming is an invention that many of us now take for granted, but back in the good old days, if you wanted to play a game then you’d have to get a hard copy of it. For the GameBoy that wasn’t a problem and as soon as you had the hard copy you could play, but for PC games and even some console games, you could need countless hours (sometimes days) before the game would be downloaded, installed, and ready to play. Cloud gaming left all that behind.
How it Works
Cloud gaming works by using servers to enable players with a good internet connection to play high-quality games instantaneously. This is possible because the server has impressive hardware, meaning that the gamer doesn’t need a super high-spec PC to be able to enjoy playing. Servers are spread around the world so that users can always be connected to one relatively close to them, helping to avoid lag. Now the market for Cloud gaming sits at around $350 million and is predicted to rise to more than $21,000 million by 2030. There are various factors at play in this, but the worldwide rollout of 5G internet is likely to be the biggest contributing factor.
Gesture Control
Gesture Control is an underused technology, despite it having been in the gaming field for some time. It burst onto the scene with the release of Nintendo Wii. This gaming console promised to revolutionize how people played video games, by arming them with a stick-shaped controller, instead of a regular one. Holding this stick, players could gesture with it in various ways. You could box against a partner, go bowling, practice your golfing swing, and more. This was a fun gimmick, but few people would say that the Wii was the best-loved console out there.
With that said, there’s huge potential for this technology to be taken further. Breath of the Wild has made a good attempt at including gesture control in their games and if they decide to carry on down that path, the next release could be incredible.
How It Works
Gesture Control works by using cameras to sense movement. Some (including the Wii) use an additional tool, special controllers, to sense the movement, whilst others can recognize different points on a naked human hand. They then use these points to reference where the hand is and the shape it might be making.
Augmented and Virtual Reality
Finally, augmented reality and virtual reality are terms for when your reality is altered, in this instance by gaming companies. Virtual reality or VR is when your reality is completely removed, and you’re placed in an entirely new one. A VR headset can achieve this by showing you a new image of the world, sometimes with the addition of sound or movement.
Augmented reality, or AR, on the other hand, is an altered view of your actual reality. This could be as simple as an overlay in some AR glasses or as complex as an addition to a set of glasses that projects images of Godzilla onto the world. There are a whole host of both VR and AR games, but without a doubt, the most famous is Pokémon Go, an AR game that brought technology to the masses.