Could 5G and augmented reality bring the casino experience to printed lottery tickets?

When you ask those who visit a casino what they remember about the experience, most of the time its the sounds of coins, the electronic whistles, and the colorful graphics, when you hit that jackpot the experience is overwhelming, but if we the marketers know just how much the casino clients love this sound and sights cocktail, why not bring it to a printed product?

Can it be done? Yes, and the question is: Why not? 

Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that superimposes a virtual reality into our own. For example, the smartphone Snapchat application uses filters to superimpose wigs, mustaches, dog ears, and animations on top of our faces, allowing users to take a photo or video of themselves and share it with friends and family. Other apps can superimpose items on people via camera or QR code, for example, clothing (Converse Shopping App), makeup (Estée Lauder’s Voice-Enabled Makeup Assistant App), and even furniture in an empty room (Ikea Place App). 

This technology along with 5G can be used to augment common lottery tickets and best of all, only 4 pieces are needed to build this experience:

• A lottery ticket with a suitable barcoding / QR code
• A smartphone capable of handling AR (most current smartphones do)
• An app designed to handle the incoming/outgoing data
• A low latency, reliable 5G network ( but a 4G could work too)

Common lottery tickets could easily use this technology allowing for a printed bar code to be read by a smartphone app and a respective graphics and sound spectacle be presented to the customer. These graphics could be tailored to the capabilities of the network, simple graphics and sounds for a 4G area and the full experience for a 5G network.

Why is 5G a very good complement? 

• Speed: Current 4G could reach in ideal conditions 7-12 Mbps of download data and an upload of 2-5 Mbps. While these numbers are good enough they can’t compare to 5G’s 2500+ Mbps downloads and 1280 Mbps uploads.
• Data volume: Have you seen the difference in speed when alone at home compared to being in a full baseball stadium? The more users the more your slower your data will flow. 5G has a better capacity to handle much more connected devices in the same area than 4G
• Latency: When using an augmented lottery ticket the data has to be scanned by the app, sent to a central then go back to the app with the right data to present the user the resulting graphics and sounds. Low latency is important for this process to run without bottlenecks and long waiting times.
• Reliability: Most importantly is reliability, this information needs a solid network able to handle the increasing data with a strong enough signal, and reliability is one of 5G strongest areas.

 At this moment in time, the printed lottery ticket is just that. Paper with an opportunity to gain a remuneration. The process is simple. A seller sells a ticket to the client, who stows it into his pocket until a given date when the winning numbers are announced via newspaper, television, radio, or the internet.

To tell the truth, with paper lottery tickets many times the user doesn’t remember to look up if he won for days or weeks afterward. After all, there is a limit to what a printed piece of paper could give beyond texture or colorful graphics, also weeks, after the drawing date is passed the availability to find the lists with the winning numbers, becomes more problematic.

In contrast with an augmented lottery ticket, the client just clicks on the app, scan a printed ticket’s bar code at the given date, and watches the smartphone screen, if he wins, sounds of coins and whistles come alive along with graphics dancing on top of our reality, the virtual and the real mesh together via augmented reality and 5G to bring the casino experience alive to a medium that once was just a simple piece of printed paper. The app could even remind him when to check the winning numbers.

The only step needed to bring change is an app and a printed bar code on the tickets, with this, we now can add more versatility to the old products, for example, the client could scan the lottery tickets and allow an alarm to remind him to check the ticket at a later date, he could get virtual gifts like upgraded chimes sound or obtain upgraded custom graphics if the ticket is a winner, all this as a thank you for buying the product. Just how many products can thank their customers this way?

This technology adapted for lottery sales is a win/win. 

For the customer, this is a huge plus because we have brought the casino experience to the hands of the client. Augmented Reality and 5G are available via the smartphone so no need for the medium ( printed lottery ticket ) to be powered by any kind of energy or need a way to connect to the internet. 

For the government, its also a benefit, because this innovation could bolster sales of a product they are already selling thru an established network plus the augmentation comes at a relatively small investment.

When Augmented reality and 5G meets plain paper it can gather data, it can share data, even display data in many ways possible, and augmented reality driven by 5G augments common paper by making it smart.

Just you wait and see, the next lottery ticket you buy could be your pass to a whole new casino experience. 

Jan Barbosa

Special thanks to @Onalytca @ATT @eCornell @Manuel Vexler @Katrina Ramos