'GTA 6' release date rumors 2016: Rockstar a no-show at PlayStation Meeting

"Grand Theft Auto" ("GTA") fans who had been hoping that Rockstar Games would make an announcement about the highly anticipated "GTA 6" at this year's PlayStation Meeting were disappointed when the video game developer was a no-show at the annual event last week.

Rockstar's absence at this year's conference is the latest blow to fans who have been waiting for updates about a potential "Grand Theft Auto 6" for years. The official release date for the future installment in the "Grand Theft Auto" franchise remains elusive.

The rumors that the video game developer/publisher would be at Sony's PlayStation Meeting this month began when Twitter user Tidux posted a guitar emoji and a star emoji along with the hashtag "#PSM" last month. Gamers took this as a tip that Rockstar Games would be at the Sept. 7 event. Unfortunately, not only was there no official talk of a potential "Grand Theft Auto 6," but Rockstar wasn't even there.

"Grand Theft Auto 5," the predecessor of "GTA 6," was released back in 2013, and since then, Rockstar has been conspicuously silent about the next installment in the series. In the absence of official updates on "GTA 6," various rumors have cropped up. This includes talk that the game will be set in the 1960s, that it will be set in a certain "Liberty City," and that it will feature an entire world map. All of this is mere speculation, however, and must thus be taken with a grain of salt.

Meanwhile, a group of researchers from the Intel Labs and Darmstadt University in Germany recently published a paper on their efforts to extract data from open-world games such as "Grand Theft Auto V" to help train self-driving cars.

According to the researchers, "GTA 5" and other open-world games are now so realistic that they can actually be used to train computer vision systems to see and identify objects such as lamp posts and pedestrians in the real world.

"Using the acquired [video game] data to supplement real-world images significantly increases accuracy and... enables reducing the amount of hand-labeled real-world data," the researchers said in an excerpt from the paper.