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I'm Drew Breunig and I obsess about technology, media, language, and culture. I live in New York, studied anthropology, and work in advertising technology.

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My liberal schooling taught me all about the Military Industrial Complex. This triangle trade connects the armed forces, the government and industry into one big, interconnected mess where the goals of the military drives the progress of our industrial innovation. In short: all our new toys from the past half-century or so are the byproduct of war; General MacArthur’s hand-me-downs, if you will. In the past decade or so it seems this triangle has become a square, with a new point heading up a vast amount of the innovation and trickling down progress to the military and industry sectors. This new point is the video game industry. On the military end, the Army recruits soldiers with an online FPS, controls their most bleeding edge units with game controllers and borrows gaming graphic technology to drive their simulators and train their troops. The picture above illustrates the user interface for a new unmanned vehicle prototype from John Deere and iRobot. iRobot choose to control the vehicle with Xbox and PS3 controllers, continuing their successful implementation of their Packbot, which is already deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the commercial sector, innovation from gaming is everywhere. The constant thirst for the best technology from hardcore gamers created a proving ground for companies to push limits and test technology. The benefits reaped from gaming advances in visualization and GPU capabilities are too numerous to name. In short: look to video game tech for the tools that will drive your field. (Image via The Flash Blog)

My liberal schooling taught me all about the Military Industrial Complex. This triangle trade connects the armed forces, the government and industry into one big, interconnected mess where the goals of the military drives the progress of our industrial innovation. In short: all our new toys from the past half-century or so are the byproduct of war; General MacArthur’s hand-me-downs, if you will.

In the past decade or so it seems this triangle has become a square, with a new point heading up a vast amount of the innovation and trickling down progress to the military and industry sectors. This new point is the video game industry.

On the military end, the Army recruits soldiers with an online FPS, controls their most bleeding edge units with game controllers and borrows gaming graphic technology to drive their simulators and train their troops. The picture above illustrates the user interface for a new unmanned vehicle prototype from John Deere and iRobot. iRobot choose to control the vehicle with Xbox and PS3 controllers, continuing their successful implementation of their Packbot, which is already deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the commercial sector, innovation from gaming is everywhere. The constant thirst for the best technology from hardcore gamers created a proving ground for companies to push limits and test technology. The benefits reaped from gaming advances in visualization and GPU capabilities are too numerous to name.

In short: look to video game tech for the tools that will drive your field. (Image via The Flash Blog)

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  1. dbreunig posted this