In a recent study, online gambling was named as one of the fastest growing of sectors the electronics industry. IDC estimated in 2004 that more than 72 million Americans participated in online activities, including betting online, equating to one individual in every four.
The popularity of online gambling followed PC gaming and then surpassed it in recent years as people began to enjoy gaming against each other. Online gambling allows fans to compete against multiple opponents without having to share computers, leave home or wait their turn. Following an unprecedented surge of popularity, online gambling has become a multi-billion dollar industry featuring aggressive new technology designed to enhance experiences at online casinos and while betting online even further.
However, integrating such technology wasn’t always so easy. In the past, watching VDs and television and web surfing posed some tricky choices to the technology buff. If a device was used primarily for viewing TV, accessing the internet, for example, to engage in betting online, was restricted. Often the quality of the experience would be affected by the device trying to cope with too many technological processes at once.
However, it has proven time and time again, technology rises to the occasion. TV viewing has been optimized by the development of MPEG2 hardware and the EM8400 produced by Sigma Designs Inc. The ability to stream video from cable or satellite leaves the device’s central processing unit free for gaming, surfing the internet and networking. Arguably the most radical technological improvement over the years has been the quality of television text appearing on computer screens. The development of sophisticated encoders has eliminated performance issues such as flickering, color problems, rainbow effects, low resolution and text clarity.
Televisions are designed to transmit alternate lines of images in each field in order to generate a television signal using low bandwidth. A single frame consists of two consecutive fields. In Europe, 50 fields per second are transmitted, while in the United States, 60 fields per second are the norm.
However, often when text is displayed on screen, an interlacing effect can make viewing uncomfortable for the human eye. Flickering can occur, and although filters were designed to compensate for the flickering effect, they also helped to blur text on screen. Often Asian text and some smaller fonts used became illegible as a result.
Several recent attempts to reduce flickering have added greatly to the work being done on flicker filtering. Adaptive filters reduce the flicker effect while also minimizing blurring. They can also help to sharpen the image, making text far sharper and easier to read than ever before. This is obviously crucial for fans of betting online who rely heavily on scores and statistics to place their bets!
While enhancing the clarity of text is difficult for any computer application viewed via television, the complexity of the text makes reproducing clarity even more difficult. Asian text, which is particularly complex, has suffered greatly in the past for this reason. It is often difficult for the eye to differentiate between the similar characters in Asian languages, and the context may not be adequate enough to allow the reader to predict the character’s identity. Several experiments in Japan using local characters were adversely affected by the problems associated with reproducing the language in text on television. However, now with enhanced sharpness, text quality is significantly improved while the flicker effect is reduced.