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Gaming might be about fun and entertainment for most people, but it is also driving innovation in sectors outside the digital entertainment industry. Technological innovations in gaming are pushing forward technology in other sectors like networking, streaming, artificial intelligence and more! Here are some of the ways that gaming has impacted other technologies and has made our lives better.
Artificial Intelligence: Healthcare, Rehabilitation, Trauma Management
Games are using artificial intelligence for their non-playable characters (NPCS) and the technology is so advanced that it is being adopted in sectors like healthcare and finance. Here are some examples:
AI-powered games are being used to help people with physical and cognitive impairments recover. For example, stroke patients can use games to retrain their brains to control their limbs, and people with Alzheimer's disease can use games to improve their memory and focus.
AI-powered games are being used to help children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) develop social and communication skills. These games can provide a safe and controlled environment for children to practice interacting with others, and they can also offer feedback and rewards to help them learn new skills.
From helping stroke survivors with rehabilitation to helping ex-soldiers manage their post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), games can be programmed with highly realistic AI to monitor responses in patients, give feedback to healthcare professionals and help with recovery.
Network and Technology: Livestreaming, Cloud Services, Content Delivery Networks
The only thing gamers hate more than losing is lag. Networking and streaming technology have grown leaps and bounds due to the demand for low-latency and high-quality streaming. The popularity of gaming has led to the development of better encoding and decoding technologies, improved content delivery networks (CDNs), and powerful server infrastructure.
The gaming community has been at the forefront of adopting and popularizing new streaming formats and features. For example, gamers were early adopters of live streaming platforms like Twitch, which helped to pave the way for the mainstream popularity of live streaming. Additionally, features like interactive overlays, chat integration, and co-streaming originated in the gaming world and have now been adopted by other streaming platforms.
The desire to play high-end games without expensive hardware has fueled the growth of cloud gaming services like Google Stadia and Microsoft xCloud. These services rely on powerful cloud servers to render games and stream them directly to users' devices. This technology is still in its early stages, but it has the potential to revolutionize the way we play games and access other data.
Hardware: Smartphones, Displays, Consumer Devices
Video game technology is improving rapidly and it has led to hardware manufacturers like NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm to develop increasingly powerful and efficient hardware that benefits not just gamers but also science and research, and improves overall productivity.
Modern games require complex calculations and sophisticated physics engines, demanding powerful CPUs. Gaming's influence has led to improvements in processing speed, multi-core architecture, and processing capabilities, making CPUs faster and more efficient for all sorts of tasks. Graphics card manufacturers are also improving their graphics processing technology which is used not just for gaming but also scientific research, medical imaging and AI development.
High-resolution displays (4K, 8K) and advanced technologies like OLED with incredible color accuracy and contrast are now commonplace. These high-end technologies are becoming a part of smartphones as well, which greatly improves the user experience of the average consumer and not just gamers.
Gaming has also fueled the evolution of controllers, keyboards, and mice. Features like haptic feedback, motion sensing, and adaptive triggers enhance immersion, while high-precision sensors and customizable RGB lighting appeal not only to gamers but also to professionals who value responsive and personalized input devices.
Smartphones have possibly benefited the most from the advancements in gaming with the latest high-end devices offering high-performance processors, incredible graphics, and top-notch displays that might not have been possible without gaming.
In a nutshell, video games make our tech better by improving how it looks, how we interact with it, and even how we connect to the internet. They brought us exciting new experiences that simply would have not been possible without gaming.
