Pokémon GO Stole Our Data And Made 30 Billion AR Image Map of the World! #shorts #pokemon
“Five hundred million people installed that app in 60 days,” Brian McClendon, CTO at Niantic Spatial, tells MIT. It continued to have a large user base for a decade, each one of those players continuing to grab visual data while chasing Pokémon around the planet. The result is what it calls its Large Geospatial Model, or LGM, which is at the core of its Visual Positioning System, or VPS, that is based on the 30 billion images captured by Niantic Games users over 10 years.
Niantic Spatial launched using that trove of what it characterizes as “crowdsourced data” to build its LGM. Because it has access to those 30 billion AR images of urban landmarks that have been geotagged with extremely accurate location markers, thanks to the hundreds of millions of Pokémon GO players, the company can pinpoint a user’s exact location on a map to within a few centimeters based on landmarks and buildings within a field of view.
“Our technology is based on a third-generation digital map that captures the content of the world at a level of fidelity never before achieved, enabling both people and machines to understand it in new exciting ways. This is part of the connective tissue that will enable AI to meaningfully understand and interact with the physical world,” Niantic Spatial says.
This data is already being used in a collaboration with Coco Robotics, a startup that builds delivery robots.
