The casino industry relies heavily on the data exploration and visualization tool heatmapping, which Quick Custom Intelligence (QCI) has revolutionized with QCI Heatmap, an advanced contour heatmapping tool that transforms the way casinos interact with slot performance data.
QCI’s co-founder and CTO, Andrew Cardno, is a top authority on heatmapping. He has developed many innovative visualization methods, including the deep zoom image format now widely used in mapping tools. His work has earned him the distinction of being a two-time Smithsonian Laureate for Heroism in Information Technology.
“In 2001, when I was first starting out in this industry, I was awarded my second Smithsonian Laureate for the things we were able to do with heat mapping at Crown Melbourne in Australia,” Cardno revealed. “By bringing a customer experience-based contour heat mapping view for optimization of the gaming floor, the published numbers resulted in a $75-million after-tax improvement in profits over six months.”
Cardno explained that, at the time, he used “an enormous server to run the data, which literally took days to build the heat maps to render the views of the casino floor”.
“Twenty-five years later, we have QCI Heatmap, which is rendering dynamically, using the latest graphics processing engines, at over 60 frames per second, making QCI Heatmap the most responsive and flexible data exploration tool I have ever built,” he continued. “This opens the door to much more beautiful renderings and more dynamic environments, producing a completely new generation of what I have been pioneering.
“I literally moved to America to pioneer heatmapping in casinos. I finally have the product I dreamed of 25 years ago, but the technology wasn’t available. In 2000, Crown invested about one million dollars in image rendering hardware, software, and computing infrastructure. Today it runs on a desktop or iPad.”
QCI Heatmap reimagines data visualization techniques using state-of-the-art graphics processing, machine learning, and QCI’s proprietary and intellectual property. High performance rendering technology, GPU acceleration, and AI-driven insights enable real-time interactive exploration at a level never before seen.
Understanding gaming floor performance has always been a pivotal metric in maximizing profits, but traditional implementations were limited by static visualizations, sluggish responsiveness, and an inability to scale dynamically.
With QCI Heatmap, those limitations have been eliminated.
“It is a completely different, dynamic world,” Cardno said. “It is what people need. The ability to be able to interact and say ‘Show me this data or show me that data; show me this metric or that metric’.
“Perspectives of this kind of data were indeed possible when I began doing this work. However, you would ask the question, and one or two days later you might see the result, depending upon what you were looking for. Now they are doing it in minutes. I am very proud of the work that I have been leading in the industry for this.”
Cardno said the console heat mapping that the gaming industry has done is ahead of other industries, and he believes that the advantage that exists in gaming is that there is so much great, impactful data to analyze from where things happen on the floor.
“It is precisely why console heat mapping is such a great fit for the gaming space, because we have all this locational knowledge about where the revenue is being generated,” he continued. “It brings to the table analytics and knowledge that not too long ago everybody thought was incapable of being delivered, or even what the capabilities were, because we didn’t have the technology. We didn’t have the background to derive this information.”
Cardno believes concentrating developmental and technological efforts into the modern evolution of classic data visualization to the level which QCI has attained is critical to a thorough understanding of the gaming floor.
“There are two quite distinct kinds of data associated problems,” he said. “The first is broadly characterized as reporting, which can include AI and everything associated with it. Reporting is when we know the questions. You have known data and known relationships in the data.
“The second broad category problem is data exploration. Here you don’t know what the questions should be. You don’t know what patterns in the data you should be analyzing. You don’t know the opportunities. Through data exploration tools, which can also include AI, you identify the questions that you should be asking.”
QCI Heatmap seamlessly integrates with the QCI Enterprise Platform, offering unparalleled real-time insights, according to Cardno.
It elevates data visualization to the next level by revealing real-time interactive overlays of slot performance, customer behavior, and revenue patterns; optimization for both desktop and iPad; and deep integration with the QCI Enterprise Platform for multi-dimensional analysis.
“Many times, after looking at contour heat maps, I’ll take a walk out onto the floor,” Cardno revealed. “At times I have even inquired of a player why they are on this game and not another one. The two games for me had been tagged as the same version, the same manufacturer.
“One player responded by saying that the game they were on was a much better version than the other one. I discovered it really was. It was a subtly different version. It just wasn’t ‘tagged’. I went back, found the two different versions, tagged the data, and it was like night and day.”
Cardno discovered that they were not the same game. It was only because he was able to visualize the data that there was something wrong. He believes that with data exploration, knowing the right questions to ask can be challenging.
“Take, for example, game performance and the usage patterns of the top one thousand guests on a Wednesday afternoon,” he speculated. “You ask yourself, what are the nuances to begin exploring different aspects of the data?
“Questions you should be asking include ‘What is the configuration that my top one thousand guests on Wednesday afternoons like to see?’ Yet that is not what we do. We just look at it as a monthly number.”
At issue here, according to Cardno, is that before you were not thinking about the guests. With data exploration, he says, you begin thinking about the guests over time, by group, even the day of the week, and a configuration to meet the needs of the guests.
Which begs the question: Well, what good is it? I cannot do anything.
“Well, you actually can.” Cardno said. “An operator can start doing promotions and yielding the floor, much like you would for a hotel room, for that time of day, for that group of guests. And this is because promotional activities can always be overlaid any time of day, any day of the week.
“Today the promotional activities on a gaming floor are run largely independent of the product. If you think about a hotel, promotions are run to fill the hotel, and optimizations are run to maximize it. In many ways a gaming floor is like a hotel because you have space, you have a game, and you have space.
“The industry is selling time and experiences on the gaming floor. The same pattern applies now to a hotel as it does to the gaming floor. Through time-of-day analysis, through looking at customers, an operator can gain insight into how to yield to the gaming floor, including through promotions and at different times of the day, on different days of the week, and through different groups of customers.”
