Games without frontiers

While the glassy-eyed adolescent may remain the gaming industry's most iconic consumer, there are increasing signs that the technology behind an industry that is worth around $10bn (£6bn) a year globally has vast potential beyond the walls of darkened teenage bedrooms.

Now, advances in both graphics and hardware are fuelling technology development in areas ranging from healthcare to cutting-edge robotics research.

One person at the cusp of this technology transfer is

Murray Shanahan, who is using graphics processing technology originally developed for the gaming industry to push out the boundaries of artificial-intelligence (AI) research.

Shanahan, a professor in cognitive robotics, explained that gamers' demands for evermore realistic and impressive graphics have driven a corresponding increase in the number-crunching ability of the graphics processing units that deliver the gaming experience. 'We've had dedicated graphics cards in PCs for a couple of decades — these cards have been getting more and more sophisticated. A lot of that is driven by the demand for evermore sophisticated games and the rendering of very realistic graphics on the screen, which is what gamers want,' he said.