Technology normally has to percolate in the military or the space program before it trickles down to private companies and consumers. But video games are an interesting exception. A few years ago, scientists realized that the graphics chips in video games could function as cheap, ultrafast math processors. You could build a low-cost supercomputer just by wiring together a half dozen or more Sony Playstations (manual). The result: Desktop high-performance computing (HPC) was born. Recently, researchers in robotics-related areas have harnessed HPC computing for computationally intensive tasks, such as computer vision.