Although controlling unmanned aerial drones in Afghanistan remotely from the safety of U.S. shores is not quite reality yet, video games and modern warfare may have more in common than you think.
From satellite-navigation to dashboard displays, military technology has always found its way into the hands of consumers. But recently, technology has been moving in the other direction as scout-snipers use iPhone apps to locate their targets and Air Force engineers use Playstation 3 consoles to develop new radar technology. Although this trend is new, video games may have earned a permanent place within the military’s arsenal [via The Economist]:
A British soldier takes the edge off with a Nintendo DS in Afghanistan
Most shocking of all is the fact that the PS3 may one day save our lives. Instead of developing a unique architecture, IBM used 12,960 PS3 processor chips to
help build one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, Roadrunner. Housed in the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Roadrunner operates at approximately one petaflop (1,000 trillion
calculations per second) and will be used to predict the behavior of
nuclear weapons.
So when Infinity Ward’s games finally inflame Russia to bring us to midnight, we’ll have Sony’s console to save us!