Watch: GTA is teaching self-driving cars how to navigate better in the real world

While you might be playing GTA to remorselessly run over people for fun, researchers are now using the popular game to train computers how to better navigate self-driving cars in the real world. Scientists from Darmstadt University in Germany and Intel Labs have developed a new clever method to source visual data from Grand Theft Auto that could then be fed to computers to teach vehicles how to drive autonomously. Momentum by TNW is our New York technology event for anyone interested in helping their company grow. Although machine learning is enabling computers to quickly pick up new skills, the approach requires large quantities of information to work effectively – and data could be hard to find sometimes. It takes thousands of hours of real-world visual data in various scenarios to teach cars how to navigate on their own, but the researchers say information from games is easy to collect and can be "almost as good, or sometimes even better" than real data.