Research applications

October 2019? Time travel confirmed for their next project.

 

This is amazing to see that this game is being used for so many things and with LIDAR coming in that makes it more exciting

 

What will this feature be used for, to test code for a real car or just to add stuff to the game, cause what ever reason I like it.

 

what's next? relativistic time dilation as part of the core physics engine?

 

Cool

 

What map is that? doesn't look like WCU

 

it's pretty clearly WCU they passed by the gavril dealership at 0:55, Possibly the Hospital at 1:59 just to point out a few landmarks

 

I only know roughly what LIDAR is, but that looks cool anyways

 

Basically, the device sends out a fairly impressive amount of laser pulses in a 360 degree circle. these invisible lasers bounce back to the device, and by calculating the time of the round trip, the device knows how far away the object was that it bounced off of. In fact, it is also possible to calculate closing velocity with these beams by observing the 'shift' in frequency of the laser. (this is how the LIDAR speed guns the police use to catch speeders work, just very simplified) if you have enough of these laser pulses, the device can actually allow a computer to 'see' obstacles and obstructions in real time.

This technology has applications in autonomous vehicles because of the issues of computer image recognition. It turns out your brain is pretty amazing at inferring things like depth, size, motion, and perspective even from a still image. When computers first started being used for images, it was widely assumed that image recognition would be a simple task for computers since it is such a trivial task for humans. If you see a pedestrian crossing a road, you can recognize and infer that there is an object in your way, what the object is doing, where the object is going, and what you need to do to prevent a felony hit and run. You also know that the traffic pole on the side of the road is not likely to be a threat so it can be safely ignored until further notice You can do this from a video feed or even from a still image, too. What computers see is a bunch of blueish-gray pixels on an other, more different gray background. sure, the blob of pixels is moving/changing, but so is literally every other pixel on the darn screen.

LIDAR gives the computer a way to respect solid objects and gives it enough data to hopefully not hit stuff. Most people don't trust a computer to be driving on the same road with them, no matter how many frickin' laser beams the car is exuding. also, cars and lawsuits are expensive, so it makes sense for LIDAR research to be happening in a virtual environment as it develops enough to become widely adopted. of course, LIDAR is only a part of the solution, after all, what good are eyes without a brain?

 

Does this mean laser scanned real roads?

Better that than autonomous car research. Those things can burn as far as I'm concerned. I think I'd actually rather have bicycles around than robocars, especially if the latter combine with VR as some companies have spoke of.

 

Potential for improved AI? Maybe?

 

Mind blown as always.

 

So the devs are using Lazers to make the AI aware of their suroundings, and which is also used on real autonomous vehicles.
Thats Cool man!

 

does this affect the main game?

 

Oooooh, I looked on the research page, and the devs are also working on radar and ultrasonic sensors, as well as GPS. radar and ultrasonic technologies are incredibly simular to LIDAR, but radar uses radio waves and ultrasonic uses sound. (it's basically SONAR, but not in water.) this is pretty interesting since radar is better for monitoring objects a long distance away or for monitoring an area or zone. Radar is also much more resilient to attenuation (basically when there is so much stuff in the air, like smoke or raindrops or clouds that it blocks the signal from bouncing back off the target object) due to fog or smog than LIDAR. Ultrasonic sensors are better suited to finding relatively small and close objects, because they are nearly immune to attenuation as long as they operate in a perfectly uniform medium, but density changes can throw off measurements at long distances. An ultrasonic sensor typically offers a better resolution than a radar system. We might be seeing Radar guided cruise control or ultrasonic parking systems in the game sometime!

At this time, we are not really sure. This is in the research blog, and I'm not sure if this is developed enough for prime time yet. It looks to me like the devs are helping a research institution with a cost effective way of testing their autonomous vehicle software. Weather or not that institution allows Beam to use their code is questionable, as is if they want to rewrite traffic/ AI to use these systems. I think this could add a lot of processing time to AI vehicles which would slow down the game. I'm sure that one way or another, these features will be used in game, but when or how is anyone's guess at this point.

 

they're doing this for one of their car company partnerships if I remember correctly

 

Upon consideration, the most likely in-game use of this research (which, by the way, I still believe should be the only use of this research) is to make the AI more aware of and adaptable to its surroundings. Currently, as far as I know, it's still rather robotic and "derpy" in that it doesn't really "see" the environment as we see it. It just sees a network of waypoints, and follows them religiously. So while it has become rather decent at knowing how fast it can take a given corner in a given car (most of the time anyway), it'll just plow straight into any props or unfriendly terrain that happen to be between two waypoints.

 

I've said it once and I'll say it again, I see BeamNG thriving in the commercial sector far more than they have thrived in the video game sector. Seeing how well they've done in the video game sector, it's extremely promising.