Innovating the gambling space isn’t just about finding the next edge to attract new gamblers; it’s about bridging the gap from the last generation of player to the next. Understanding how to best do that can be helped a bit by taking an academic view of the shift. To do just that, our Rebecca Liggero Fontana spoke with Robert Rippee, Director of the Hospitality Lab at the International Gaming Institute of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

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Before even starting to work on the thing that appeals to today’s youth, it’s important to understand what makes them difference. “First step is to understand that those two generations are very different, so what works for one may not work for the other, which is in theory why they need to market to the younger generation,” he said. “So the experiences that they designed and built that appeals to my generation doesn’t necessarily appeal to yours. So the way that you get around that is first of all, you have to kind of take a risk. You have to take a risk in figuring out what do I want? Or what does a younger generation want? Then there’s a second part that says if you do it right, you have examples of things like technology that have been designed and introduced to younger generations that made their way, and are accepted and used by other generations.”

Thankfully, a whole new wave of technology could help attract the millennial and Gen-Z generations. “In fact, I would say the clues to us are in things like virtual reality and augmented reality,” he began. “And in machine learning, artificial intelligence, I think if I were to predict a world for now, so in 20 year from now, you have to assume that things like integrated circuits are everywhere, right? They’re in the wall, they’re in the floor, they’re in your microphone. And the amount of data that’s flowing through is so massive that it takes machine learning to process. What that means is that there are new opportunities for smart machines. So some of the burden that we take in our own brains is offloaded to machines and we spend more time on creative things like virtual reality being in different worlds, or augmented reality, of changing the world we currently live in.”