this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2025
113 points (86.9% liked)
Technology
60473 readers
6802 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This cat is thoroughly out of the bag. People have been building computer vision powered automatic sentry guns that shoot paint balls or nerf darts or spray water for a while now.
See, for example, this video from 2012, which was probably about one of the first ones.
In comparison, here's a new video from a few weeks ago as part of "YouTube Maker Secret Santa" where the guy built a very good working Nerf replica of a TF2 level 2 sentry gun. He didn't even bother talking much about the motion tracking part because it was already a solved problem (see timestamp 17:50), so instead he spent the video talking about the ammo chain design and the aesthetics (and playing with the Secret Santa gift he had received from another maker).
That's the state of automatic AI turrets in 2025: trivial enough to omit discussion of the tracking tech and cheap enough to build to fit in a Secret Santa gift budget.
I saw a video before 2008 where a guy hooked an air gun up to a laptop and it was targeting and calculating projectile velocity and leading targets.