Sora and Disney Bring Us One Step Closer to ‘Holodeck’ Home Casinos

One of the most exciting aspects of any emerging technology is playing "what if" with how it could one day influence the online gambling experience. It is also not something that can be overlooked as purely speculative, as apart from military and adult implementations, the gambling space is one of the most aggressive technology-focused industries in the world.

Leading casino software developers were at the bleeding edge of internet gambling, live streaming advancements, and mobile casino development (with Microgaming even building games specifically for smartwatches at one point), not to mention their attempts to integrate augmented and virtual reality in gaming.

What Does a Home Holodeck Casino Need?

In 1974, Gene Roddenberry's sci-fi series Star Trek introduced the world to the idea of a holodeck. Inspired by recent advances in holography, the holodeck was postulated as a space filled with computer-generated environments and characters that users could interact with as though they were real.

While developers continue to create ever more impressive virtual reality (VR) headsets, one of the most daunting challenges has been the technology needed to build procedurally generated worlds and interactive agents with those worlds that can respond in real-time to people's movements and conversations.

However, the recent reveal of AI video generator SORA and Disney’s HoloTile floor system could be the genesis of holodeck technology becoming a reality. Better yet, we could have personal holodeck online casinos to play with at home.

Transforming Words into Engaging Videos

The first step to creating a truly engaging holodeck casino environment is conjuring a realistic space filled with people, animals, and other accouterments that enhance its authenticity.

OpenAI, the creators of the revolutionary ChatGPT text learning model, just unveiled their latest project, Sora. Sora is a groundbreaking new text-to-video generative AI model that uses text prompts to instantly create videos that are so real you would swear it was filmed and produced by a high-end studio.

However, not just the editing and environments appear startlingly real; every person and animal you see in the video is a Sora-generated avatar. None of them are real!

In the screenshot below, the woman walking in Japan is an example; that scene never existed in the real world – Sora created the setting, weather, reflections, lighting, and all the people.

The entire scene was created using this very simple text prompt:

“A stylish woman walks down a Tokyo street filled with warm glowing neon and animated city signage. She wears a black leather jacket, a long red dress, and black boots, and carries a black purse. She wears sunglasses and red lipstick. She walks confidently and casually. The street is damp and reflective, creating a mirror effect of the colourful lights. Many pedestrians walk about.”

The above prompt was all that Sora needed to deliver a fully realised world. Once this technology is fully fleshed out and can use the blockchain to store and share data, the potential for someone to speak a desired gambling setting into being and have Sora create it in moments is at our fingertips.

It can even reskin the games we play into an experience that fits the world. Virtual darts in a pub setting become a virtual bow and arrow contest in a medieval setting. Want to chill lakeside and fish? Have Sora gamify your fishing experience, assigning values and prizes to what you catch using the payout mechanics for online slots. The possibilities are endless.

Disney Steps Up Its Holodeck Flooring

A core component of the holodeck experience in the original sci-fi series was the crew’s ability to traverse the lands they entered. Moving across town or along a path took a physical toll. As great as some VR experiences are at simulating distance and movement, your body knows it is not facing any resistance.

Rather than the solution to this problem coming from the technology sector, the researchers at Disney developed an astounding new piece of tech, which they have named HoloTile.

Disney Imagineer Lanny Smoot spoke openly about his love of Star Trek and how the concept of the holodeck and its seeming impossibility inspired him to develop the HoloTile system, saying:

“You certainly can do part of that with virtual reality. That will get you the visuals. But how do you do the physical walking with a finite space? We’re not going to build a whole planet for you to walk on if you want to experience something. I started looking at different ways that you could move things on a floor.”

After patenting more than one hundred other pieces of technology, his solution was to create an omnidirectional treadmill embedded in the floor. This treadmill can shift and guide users to keep them “walking” within its perimeter.

While Disney is naturally tight-lipped about exactly how it works, hundreds of tile-like discs respond to inputs from lidar-based sensors to nullify the user's attempt to walk off it. Shifting the discs and working against the person's step direction, like walking against the flow of a treadmill, gives the illusion of multi-directional movement without allowing the user to leave its surface.

This sounds exactly like what an actual virtual reality casino needs to allow its patrons to socialise with one another, move around the casino games, and even leave the casino floor to stand on a balcony and watch the street performers outside. Tempting, isn't it?

Cutting Edge Tech On the Horizon

While the advancements in Sora and the creation of Disney's HoloTile flooring will set the groundwork for us to have a personal holodeck casino at home one day, two additional developments could significantly impact the reality of this virtual world.

• Neural Link: Elon Musk has pioneered the brain-chip implant space. His company, Neuralink, recently performed its first successful human implant, allowing a disabled man to navigate his computer, play chess online, and even enjoy a game of Civilisation VI, all with the power of his mind. While it sounds like magic, it is simply science.
• MindEye2: Using AI, the developers of MindEye2, an fMRI-to-image processing application, have achieved incredible state-of-the-art image retrieval, reconstruction, and caption generation with only one hour of training data (down from the 40 hours required by its competitors). Yes, you heard that right. This technology can literally read your thoughts and display them accurately on a screen.

When fully realised, it is AI-powered apps and tech like these that will help the virtual casino to respond to your needs, more clearly understand the nuances of human interaction, and even better understand what it is we want to see and experience when spending time online gambling, traveling to magical worlds, or just sitting with a loved one enjoying a sunset on Mars.