The entire automotive industry seems to be focused on self-driving cars. It is no longer a dream of the future, but a very real reality. However, more than just car companies are getting in on the action. Gaming chip manufacture, NVIDIA, has been working very hard to get autonomous vehicles to hit the road as soon as “the next few years.”
Sahin Kirtavit, Senior Director of Automotive Solutions at NVIDIA said:
I think you’re going to see truly self driving cars—I’m not talking about cars that drive only thirty seconds and then gives control back to you—truly self-driving cars in the next few years on the road. And we are super excited that once the car drives itself, what you’re going to do is play games.
They have already partnered with Volvo to bring the NVIDIA’s Drive PX 2 to help with Volvo’s self-driving cars, but what is most interesting is the last part of the quote, “play games”. NVIDIA has also revealed that it used Gran Turismo’s game engine to help with self-driving simulations. As we all know, Gran Turismo always has some of the best graphics of any game, and that is exactly what NVIDIA needed for their testing.
We actually used the game engine two years ago to start our simulation effort and we figured out we needed more high fidelity graphics. The game engines have a lot that the simulator needs. I think game engines are extremely close to perfect simulators.
When you think about it, racing games like Gran Turismo actually offer the perfect enviroment for testing self-driving vehicles. Gran Turismo in particular has put many years into developing tracks that are as close as possible to the real thing. While still not perfect, there is no denying that Gran Turismo has pretty realistic roads, cars, and environments. Looks like Gran Turismo’s motto, “the real driving simulator”, is a lot more accurate than even they would of guessed.
Source: IGN
