If you’ve ever played “Grand Theft Auto V,” you know how realistic the game is. It’s apparently so realistic, in fact, it could help shape the future of transportation.
Deploying and researching self-driving technology costs companies valuable resources, especially time. This is where simulation platforms, including “GTA V,” come into play for engineers looking to test the various conditions autonomous vehicles could encounter on the road, according to Automotive News.
“Just relying on data from the roads is not practical,” Davide Bacchet, head of Nio’s simulation efforts, recently said, via Automotive News. “With simulation, you can run the same scenario over and over again for infinite times, then test it again.”
Given “GTA V’s” variety of vehicles, weather conditions, characters and streets, the game reportedly is a valuable tool for people working on autonomous technology. Last year, scientists in Germany and Intel Labs found ways to pull visual information from the game, and now researchers are taking actual data from “GTA V” and applying it to the tech they’re working on, according to Automotive News.
“(The game) is the richest virtual environment that we could extract data from,” Alain Kornhauser, who advises Princeton University’s Autonomous Vehicle Engineering team, said, via Automotive News.
We’re not sure if future self-driving vehicles need to account for gang members escaping hoards of police and hopping into helicopters, but who knows what the world will look like in the next 10 years.
Thumbnail photo via Flickr/Ferino Design
