Using GTA 5 should help prepare autonomous vehicles for real traffic – How this looks, you can see here.
Grand Theft Auto has been known for its brutal driving and gameplay style since the release of the first part of the series. Ironically, GTA 5 is now supposed to help improve software for driverless cars. The huge 3D world with its many streets, cars, and pedestrians offers situations and challenges similar to real traffic.
GTA 5 as a template for the real world?
As reported by Technologyreview, a research team from the University of Darmstadt and Intel Labs has developed a clever method to extract important training data from Grand Theft Auto. The researchers have created software that operates between the game and computer hardware. Various objects displayed in the game are classified by this software. Thus, the program distinguishes between pedestrians, cars, or other objects and items appearing in the game. Through this pattern, the software can learn to differentiate these items when they occur in the real world. We can see what such software can look like in the following videos.
In the video, you can see how the car travels without a “driver” in the world of Grand Theft Auto. As mentioned in the comments of the video, the frequent braking is caused by a bug that has since been fixed. Driving with the simulator is now supposed to be much “smoother”.
Using a heat map overlay, the software recognizes various information regarding the distance of objects and vehicles. With the help of a GTA trainer, the developers change various weather options. This prepares the software for dynamic weather.
