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I like Pokemon Go and play almost every day. I did this scan one time and then stopped. The rewards are not worth the hassle. I don't think many players are doing it. It's just very weird to stand somewhere and scan an object.

I also wouldn't say 'unknowingly trained', it's pretty obvious what it does, and I think the game even tells you that they want to understands how the POI looks like in 3D.

My son showed me how he does these quests: he points the phone at the floor and just wiggles it back and forth.
> I don't think many players are doing it.

Do we have to think? Apparently they amassed 30B images. :)

I used to just record the ground and even leave out my feet, but apparently they detect and ban people who do this too often now. The data was always going somewhere shady, but after the sale it is even worse so I just stopped completely. At best you get a poffin or rare candy and that absolutely is not worth it.
> obvious what it does, and I think the game even tells you that they want to understands how the POI looks like in 3D.

But most people probably assumed the purpose was to improve the game, not to train delivery robots.

Or whatever else they end up doing with the data. If, as the article suggests, this ends up adding to the surveillance state by making geolocation of photos more accurate, then I really don't think that's what the players had in mind.

Same, I do it once in a great while. Give me a rare candy or rare candy XL per scan and you’ll find me jumping all over the neighborhood!
I'd imagine it's not just the research quests, but it's submissions for new stops, too.
Niantic are a number of people who are doing this. Its not that clear from the article, but niantic spatial are using the images captured from users to create a 3d model of "THE WORLD" or where people play pokemon go.

They have then fed that data into a more modern version of colmap (https://github.com/colmap/colmap) to create a point cloud. Then the engineering to make sure that point cloud is aligned accurately and automatically.

Once you have that point cloud aligned to the world, all you need is another image with some overlapping feature. Using simple trigonometry you can work out where the camera is from one picture

This is largely trivial to do for a few 100 sqaure meters. the hard part is doing it fast in at the city scale. Extracting a few thousand features from an image and then matching them against >billion other points is hard to do quickly, without some optimisations.

The thing that is not mentioned here is that data freshness is actually more important. Building change (advertising hoardings, paint jobs, logo changes, building remodelled etc) so the data goes stale. Its actually not that expensive anymore to just send your own people to scan areas. (A number of startups pre 2020 did it, mapillary provides a platform for it, although now owned by facebook)

The robots will be feeding that data back in to the map. the special sauce is updating the map without infringing patents, and doing it efficiently.

see this 2007 talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosyn...

i remember this being available in google maps in 2008 or so. fun technology!

Niantic has been doing this for a long time starting with Ingress. I've maybe done a handful of scans in PoGo but as others have mentioned the rewards were just not worth the trouble. The rewards for doing it in Ingress were much better (at least back in the day).

I'm more split on my feelings towards it these days given our current political/social climate but part of me still thinks the idea of mapping the real world in great detail is a worthy endeavor if it can be done "right". I'd probably be more inclined to support it if they would release the data or make it publicly accessible for others to use but it being tied to the whims of a corporation (even one that's been less shitty than most) makes it hard to get behind.

> I'd probably be more inclined to support it if they would release the data or make it publicly accessible for others to use

Open Street Maps does exactly this, and could do with more volunteers and/or donations.

> if they would release the data or make it publicly accessible for others

HAH! Deep dreams.

At what point will we have people transmit their car dash cams along with GPS information in order to generate more data? I’m actually surprised this hasn’t happened yet with self driving car manufacturers needing more and more data
Tesla does it and clearly it’s not all that useful in reality.
https://www.getnexar.com/

Not obvious if they're successfully selling any of their collected data yet, but they must at least have plans to try.

This.... absolutely already happens. It's trivial and cheap to purchase the three meter, three second resolution data of millions of vehicles.
Maybe it could help find lost pets roaming the neighborhood
Mobileye builds their maps like this
Great question. A "Ring Dashcam" with a mobile connection would win customers based on name recognition alone.

Not a lot of big companies in the dashcam market, there are a lot of alphabet companies and some small players like Vantrue. The only company with broader recognition is Garmin and it feels like a weird side gig for them.

I don't think this is the worst thing trained.

Niantic builds massive geospatial models that can localize and reconstruct views: https://www.nianticspatial.com/

Extremely detailed mappings of CONUS with spatial intelligence already built around it, and we let the company get sold to Saudi government last year.

I wouldn't say "unknowingly" since stories like [0] have been posted for years/decades and people were given "free" internet (data) to play the game [1] . It's more that people just didn't give a shit. I'm sure there are new details about the usecases for the data, but not that data was collected unknowingly

[0] https://auth0.com/blog/2016/07/11/pokemon-go-catches-all-you... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12075477

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/14/12192752/t-mobile-pokemon... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099159

Despite the lack of transparency, is this so bad? Players are being given a game in exchange for collectively building a database.
It's the lack of transparency that is bad. PokemonGo did not make it clear it was taking (and uploading) pictures.

You could argue that "of course it must be for AR", but that isn't clear at all. The camera shows a live image before I take a photo, and I wouldn't expect a photo to be captured and sent if I didn't press the (virtual) shutter.

There are probably some cheap phones that do precisely that, and I'd be just as annoyed at them and raise the same concerns.

Database that will one day be used to program cruise missile.
I'm not positive this was a secret (See: Reddit post about it from 2018):

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSilphRoad/comments/8i7byi/pokemo...

I’m sure all the Pokémon Go players caught that post!
Pizza delivery robot, or a live grenade delivery robot, depending on the country and the dataset buyer.
> crowdsourced data, seemingly collected for one purpose

> Whether players knew it or not, those scans were creating 3D models of the real world

Kind of shitty reporting. Did users know about this data collection or not? Was it not disclosed?

Looks like teenagers are going to have fun playing Pokemon Go, and now have faster food deliveries.

It's useful to map the world, this is what Google / Baidu / Yandex Maps are doing too.

Not unexpected, but it looks the oldest kid, Ingress, is being ignored again. IIRC, there was some badge you could earn by doing a number of those scans.

Or is Ingress even still around?

I don't think anyone actually cares about this in principle. This is more of a product and marketing problem than a legal or moral one.

What people dislike is noticing the strings attached so distastefully. I can't think of any fads or pastimes where there aren't any, but the benefits of the activity offered should outweigh the cost.

In that sense, Pokémon Go was a bad deal. I still don't get what was ever in it for the player.

wasnt this sort of obvious to anyone familiar with Niantic?
Big corporations have found the way to make us work for free in their own terms. The balance of power between the working class and capital is totally broken.

And for me it is not just the lack of transparency. It is the power balance. I should not need to work for free, give my data, and god knows what to play a game. I should not be living knowing that I am being exploited at each interaction with software. Transparency is good, but not enough. "Click here to accept" and thousands of lines of legalese do not create a fair society.

Those pokestop scans are trash. I can't believe they will get enough detailed information out of them to allow navigation by robots.
I think that only the author of this post didn't know that. Everybody know that Niantic is a big data company.
Pretty sure you take a video when you’re doing this task so the images are extra extracted from the video?
Millions of software devs unknowingly trained LLMs to start replacing their jobs.

PUSH your code to fit to find out more.

Does anyone remember Ingress? I always wondered what it was we were training by playing that game.
I did not see that coming back then. But now, I think, how did I not see that coming?
I knew, or strongly assumed, and think it’s a great dynamic.
Nintendo's brand means nothing.
Stalking as a service - upload a photo of your target and get back gps coordinates, coming soon!
> The massive crowdsourcing effort could use real-world to help robots deliver pizza.

Huh? Does popsci not have copy editors?

Lmao - well done Niantic
My friend plays Pokémon Go for hours every day while walking his dog. I asked him about this and now we’re both confused. The in game scanning is only for major landmarks in the game. Even in his dense city these landmarks are few and far between. The world model would only have sparse information in the area immediately surrounding these landmarks.

I don’t know if there’s much substance to the delivery robot story. This could be a journalist trying to make the story relatable.