One project I had to learn to use an FPGA for was to make a working sensor system for the HTC Vive. It involves timing laser pulses very accurately and quickly

One project I had to learn to use an FPGA for was to make a working sensor system for the HTC Vive. It involves timing laser pulses very accurately and quickly and potentially concurrently. A regular microcontroller with interrupts wouldn't work well with 20+ sensors as each interrupt could potentially block another one happening at the same time. So with an FPGA you define a "block" of hardware that handles one sensor, then copy it multiple times and have each block send the final timing data to an overarching hardware block. That way each sensor has its own dedicated hardware block and they can work in parallel.