With more games than any other casino in the world, WinStar World Casino and Resort - an economic enterprise of the Chickasaw Nation - offers more than 7400 electronic games, 158 tables games, a 3500-seat Global Event Center, and an 895-room WinStar World Casino Hotel. Located just north of the Oklahoma/Texas border along Interstate 35, the venue presents 24/7 gaming action, world-class entertainers, and a wide range of restaurants. And that’s just the gaming part of the resort, which also includes a hotel, golf course, several restaurants, and an entertainment center that has hosted performances by Maroon 5, Toby Keith, Kid Rock, Lil Wayne, and Al Pacino.
WinStar World Casino and Resort didn’t get where they are by playing it safe. So when the casino broke ground on its new London Gaming Plaza, they set out to create a totally new kind of ‘casino within a casino’ called Casino 360 - featuring 4000 square feet of pulsating lights, sounds, and music with 151 gaming machines offering a dynamic, interactive community experience to its Players Club members. The idea, explains WinStar senior marketing manager Jenny Cross, was to immerse players in the gaming experience with lights, social media, gameswithin-games, and elaborate jackpot celebrations - all while giving players more ways to win.
“We wanted to create a stunning visual experience to engage our patrons and draw them into Casino 360,” says Cross. “We needed the brightest possible LED displays designed and manufactured to a very specific set of requirements. We chose NanoLumens to provide these displays after considering a number of options from different manufacturers.”
The primary integration on this project was Egads, working closely with the CastNET team. The content management system software is CastNET, and it has a complete web-browser user interface, though the software is premise-based, not SaaS.
The Casino 360 gaming experience features a 4mm NanoWrap cylinder, measuring 6 feet in diameter and 5-feet tall, and a 6mm NanoSlim display that measures 20-inches tall and more than 205- feet long. In addition to the NanoLumens LED video walls, and CastNET digital signage content management software, other technologies used in this gaming room include Bally’s Elite Bonusing Suite (EBS) software, Gaming Support jackpot celebration system, and Egads lighting and automation systems.
This integration highlights the capabilities of the CastNET digital signage software to accomplish results that can-not be achieved by any other digital signage software, according the integrators. Developing the interfaces among CastNET, Egads’ lighting and automation, Bally’s software, Gaming Support’s system, and social media had never been accomplished. Close communication among these companies was required. After the interfaces were developed, they needed to be approved by the Oklahoma gaming commission - a time-consuming process.
The traditional role of a digital signage administrator-tor who schedules content does not exist in this system. CastNET monitors the alerts and signals from the Bally’s software and Gaming Support System and then automatically broadcasts jackpot celebration content and virtual racing content, as well as slot tournament standings, to the video walls and monitors. CastNET triggers the audio system and the Egads lighting and automation systems to activate different programs as part of the jackpot celebration. CastNET ties the whole immersion experience together in the room. The center circle display in the room can be split into four standard size screens or can have content wraps around all four displays. The wrapped content is four times the width of normal HD content, so it is unique. The outer wall ribbon is a very custom resolution - over 10,000 pixels wide by about 80 pixels tall. In fact, the NanoWrap cylindrical dis-play hangs over the center of Casino 360, driving a constant flow of HD video content promoting the excitement of Bally’s Elite Bonusing Suite of products, including virtual horse and NASCAR races. “We’re also using the displays to drive advertiser and in-house messaging and to encourage patrons on social media to tweet using the hashtag “#casino360” so they can see their tweets on the NanoLumens displays,” explains WinStar’s Cross. “The combination of NanoLumens displays and the latest in gaming technology has created a winning experience for all of our patrons.”
“NanoLumens’ LED displays have the unique ability to conform to any curvature without bezels,” says Nathan Remmes, director of business development at NanoLumens. “For maximum impact, we selected a mixture of 4mm and 6mm resolution based on viewing distances and content. LED technology allows for higher contrast, brighter content, and truer colors, which all make for a more immersive gaming room. Additionally, LED display energy costs are fractional, actually around half that of LCD panel tiles, because of the NanoLumens 100,000 hour lifecycle - that’s right, the lifecycle of NanoLumens’ LED Displays is around 100,000 hours — and typically all displays are front serviceable and modular.” (In the Winstar Casino, the client asked for rear serviceable for the cylinder. However, downtime is still marginalized by the quality of the LED display.) WinStar plans to expand its digital strategy to wow their Casino 360 patrons and NanoLumens LED displays will play an integral part in making this engagement a compelling experience.