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A Brief History of Unusual Objects Designed to Kill People from Far Away, Part 4: The PGF, a Self-Aiming Rifle

By Rain Noe - June 30, 2014

in Tech

We all know the movie trope of the hired assassin up on a rooftop, calmly removing his sniper rifle from a foam-padded case and assembling it with practiced ease. The man is an experienced professional with years of marksmanship training and thus, an important asset to whatever organization hired him.

In real life that assassin's work would be drying up. Because a Texas-based company called TrackingPoint is selling "the world's first Precision-Guided Firearm (PGF)," a de facto sniper rifle that aims itself, removing even the need for the joystick action we saw in the last sniper rifle we looked at, and is reportedly good for accuracy at a range of 1,200 yards. The PGF's built-in aiming system essentially means there's no expertise required, and you can throw any yokel up onto that rooftop without needing to wire $2 mil into The Jackal's Swiss bank account.

As you saw in the video, the company is targeting (no pun intended) hunters rather than hired killers. "As a sport hunter and professional marksman, I see the TrackingPoint technology as an excellent way to ensure more ethical harvesting of game," one customer said in a press release, with the "more ethical" referring to the ability to execute single-shot kills as opposed to dragging the affair out.

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James P

10 years ago

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Pretty cool, but it doesn't aim itself. You have to hold down the trigger and it delays the shot until you manually aim it at the target.
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JimC

10 years ago

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That's not an actual "wireframe," it's an edge-finding filter or a very high contrast image, probably an After Effects trick, and probably done as a separate layer over the internals.
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Guest

10 years ago

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Pretty impressive animation. Any guesses as to what software was used to simultaneously render the model and the partial wire-frame?
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