Now before you roll your eyes and scroll down to the next story, hear me out. Physics isn’t just that boring class you slept in anymore. There are actually several cool ways that physics have been blended in with video games to make them seem more real. Yeah, I said it. Physics and cool in the same sentence. My high school science teacher would have been so proud.

In the time we live in today, we have seen more and more science fiction start to become science fact. This article is a very interesting one, talking about what is going into creating a new physics chip for future video games to make things more real for the player.

To a physics fan like Manju Hegde, even today’s best video games look fake. When a building blows up in a game, he notices the debris doesn’t cascade downward like a waterfall or scatter correctly and cause damage to nearby structures.

That’s because the game creators haven’t taken the time to calculate the underlying physics equations that govern the behavior of objects such as falling bricks. Hegde, the CEO of Mountain View start-up Ageia, wants to make it easy for them to do that by making a chip for the personal computer that specializes in physics calculations.

The physics chip, dubbed PhysX, will enable things like gelatinous creatures whose bodies shift shape like a liquid, crumpling fenders in car crashes, massive explosions with 10,000 pieces of debris, clothing that hangs or wrinkles realistically and lava or blood that flows like the real thing.

“We think a game should be like the Star Trek holodeck,” Hegde says, referring to the virtual reality simulator from the science fiction TV series whose illusions were indistinguishable from real life. `”Our chip is the first step toward that.”

Ageia has raised $38 million in venture capital from firms such as Apax Partners and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. It has commitments for $30 million more from other investors. One reason that Ageia has garnered such support is that its chip could tip the scales in the PC’s battle with the game consoles.

The PC gaming community is about to be overshadowed by another set of new consoles from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. Those machines will have plenty of extra processing power to handle better physics.

The consoles will be able to calculate the interaction of moving objects and determine what the graphics chip needs to display on the screen at any instant. And they may have enough power to imbue the entire game environment with physical attributes, so that the grass sways when the wind blows or hair falls out of place when a character moves.

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