Augmented reality applied to poker? Just awesome

Developers have imagined an augmented reality application that allows you to know your chances of winning at poker with your current hand. More than just a futuristic concept, this kind of system could be all the rage when augmented reality glasses have conquered the general public.

A video of a poker game is going viral on social networks currently. It intrigues because it shows a use of augmented reality to assist the player. The cards and players are real, but percentages of winning the hand are displayed over it, virtually.

Impossible, however, to know the origin of this video which was even shared by specialists in the augmented reality like Roman Emig, of the start-up Holo Light. It is therefore likely that it represents a simple concept and not a finished product. It nevertheless looks a lot like the Poker assistant imagined by the Georgian firm UnleashARwhich also appears to be just a concept.

An already feasible concept

Such a system would rely on two artificial intelligence algorithms. The first, connected to a camera, would identify the cards in hand. There are already projects in this direction, such as the one developed at thestanford university in 2017 based on TensorFlow from Google. A second will have to analyze the combinations and calculate the probability of having a winning hand. AI DeepStack is the first to have beaten professional poker players as early as 2017 and would therefore be able to perform these calculations.

All that’s missing is a device with a camera and capable of displaying AI advice. This would be possible with a smart phone, but it wouldn’t be discreet at all. This virtual assistant would be more suitable for augmented reality glasses, such as the Google Glass Where Microsoft Hololens. Many other glasses are under development and will probably be more discreet, such as the Apple Glass which would be released at the end of the year according to rumours, or the Xiaomi Smart Glasses.