In the latest season they've gotten rid of the scan rewards, so I guess they got all the data they needed.
https://www.avclub.com/iran-becomes-first-country-to-ban-pok...
Really smart decision, in hindsight.
And then there are those guys... and they make billions, by giving a flying f*ck about ethics or what so ever. And NO ONE will hold them accountable. NO ONE! Because either they lack the power, or they are bought and in it on the scheme.
I accept that the world is like that. Just like International Law has always been nothing more than an academic exercise, business doesnt care about anyone besides profit. Its fine. Its just sad also...
It is a shameful use of tech.
I was interviewed for the Trouw piece and briefly quoted. This isn't to detract from the DroneXL piece, which adds its own angle.
A story was manufactured about arresting a 22 y.o. guy in the Church on Blood in Honour of All Saints for playing Pokemon Go.
The story went hyper-hyped for weeks, with general public sentiment that once such an obscurant retrograde declares such an innocent game so evil, it must be something to absolutely install and play in spite!
And such was the way of the Pokemon Go's viral success in Russia.
(edits for factual precision)
But the value in that data is in the liveliness right, so at some point, would it not make sense for that data to be considered a public asset?
Why do we not demand this data be released regularly (given that the inverse tech could be developed using this as well)? If it can be used to train things used for war, could it not equally be used to train better lifesaving tech (in which case, the data should be made available to the public)?
and we even have youtube videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiJOHV9rIxU
Is the geographical data more useful, or are buildings and other structures more important?
Genuinely don't know much in this space.
Ah, oh yes, "we all knew it from the start", "they indicated that up front" etc.
Fuck no, everyone was foaming at the mouth how it's just a game and no way in hell an intelligence operation.
P.S. Those who "knew it from the start" yet continued helping Niantic, did you really think that the data will be used for the greater good of the humankind?
People literally traded military intelligence for Pokémon.
That was the initial objective, improving navigation by having people walk slowly on pedestrian accessible locations instead of only the main roads. But once that data is collated, it could go anywhere and you've signed any rights to what happens with it away when you agreed to the Ts & Cs.
I guess this also explains how they were paying for the free 3d model photogrammetry processing that app does.
The story here however I'm not too sure about: Isn't the game mostly played in dense urban areas? - by the time you need military drones there the area will have changed a lot (destruction, fortification, ... and overall be outdated) where I think the civilian drones (delivery, cars, ....) benefit more. While the technology certainly is dual use.
There is no 'we'. 99%+ of people view the world as a zero sum game where for me to win, somebody has to lose and if I don't do whatever it takes, somebody else will and then I lose, therefore I have no morals or principles or virtues and anyone who does is a liar or a fool.
Everything is a bad faith act, everyone is a selfish bad faith actor and I shouldn't feel bad about being one because everyone else who isn't a fool is too.
This tragically wrong but intuitively correct worldview and much more was explained by Plato long, long ago and just about no one understood any of it. At least the text survived and people with 140+ IQ and an iota of decency can read it and be at peace knowing they're not crazy or foolish.
But I do appreciate alot about what they are doing and choose to do
Reminds me more of a theme park. Yes, a heavy handed corporation runs it and if you have any dissent it won’t go well, but if you don’t choose to focus on that then it will be a joyous place and you have the opportunity to contribute to that energy and be rewarded by something that simulates a free market
Shops come and go, churches do not move, schools tend not to move much, industry areas is somewhat dynamic, military installations might be static or dynamic, trees grow or are removed.
The geographical data already exists in digital maps. And I would expect competent militaries already have maps of enemy territory. It's the second part that was so far missing.
This combined set allows the training of AI models that can say, "When my surroundings look like x, that looks like y on a map".
So when your drone's GPS gets jammed, it can look at its surroundings, reference its (internal and offline) maps, figure out where it is, and navigate.
... Except, well, when it's the doing of this same, so called "defence" industry.
But that's not what happened. The data came from very explicit scanning tasks centered about pokestops, not the AR pokemon capture. I used it once or twice to test it out, and it was a drawn out process where it asks you to slowly orbit the pokestop while filming, then permission to upload the (huge) files. You even had to activate a special "volunteer" account flag to even see these tasks.
From TFA:
> Since 2021, Pokémon Go has asked players to record short videos of real-world locations, called Pokéstops, to earn extra in-game items. Scanning all the buildings, streets, and trees in a 360-degree sweep was optional, and Niantic asked separately for permission to keep the footage. Granting it meant agreeing to extra terms.
I'm sure they used GPS data from the players too, but I still hold that it's unlikely the AR pokemon capture yielded any data to them.
This is not at all an honest way of saying "Niantics founder raised money from In-Q-Tel"
It should also be pointed out that Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church have been understood to have been cat's paws for Russia's notorious KGB successor agencies for a very long time now.
Governments have a say on to whom their weapons manufacturers sell weapons. It should be ditto for geospatial intelligence. If you want to map geospatial data in the Netherlands, you get a license from them and store the data locally and have to get permission to exfiltrate.
This won’t stop exfiltration, of course. But it should slow it down, which in the world of geospatial intel, could mean the difference between a drone finding its target and getting lost because of new construction.
Pokemon Go does not really incentivises this activity. We get a poffin... Nice to have but does not worth the hassle of scanning and looking stupid on the street.
>Van den Hoven did not condemn battlefield VPS outright. If it helps Ukraine win a just war against an aggressor, he said, that is a good development. His worry is the system falling into the wrong hands
The professor is quite flexible with his "ethics"
And what can be done? The comments usually say a big fat nothing.
- Any fool already knew this comments: “shouldn’t be a surprise”
- I guess I should call my representative comments
- Just boycot tech comments
Usually nothing much actionable. Building the Ad/Surveillance/Privacy Invasion society? Very actionable, good pay, many mouths fed and FIRE accomplished by HN posters. There’s even at least one acronym for this life achievement.
Shoutout to digital activists that are doing something. I’m but an armchair complainer on this front.
Like in that case when he blamed the rise of toll roads in Russia - "oh brothers and sisters, shalt we allow taking the toll on what should forever be free in Russia?" - the public reacted in the exact same way - a religious zealot told this, so it must actually be a progressive, sane thing to do the opposite.
> the Russians are calling "our partners", "our would-be enemies" now.
is a total wind vane which can flip 180° in a matter of days (if not minutes, as in Orwell's scene where they seamlessly switch from being at war with Eurasia to that with Eastasia)...
The military contractor (Vantar/Maxar) in question basically admits so but just "reserves the right" to use the data which is the political battle line ala Claude and DoD.
This is mostly an ideological battle.
There is a level of evilness on that difficult to grasp. What kind of society puts that burthen on their own children?
Inequality has given power to the few deranged and depraved. No ethics, no morality, just self gratification and excess.
Spyware company spawns a new spyware company.
I am conflicted on this report.
1) VPS is not new, the startup I worked at had a working public system in 2018.
2) The hard part about VPSs is not actually the navigation, its generating and querying the map.
How does the VPS work?
You build a point cloud of features (for us we paid people to go and record videos in cities, Tesla/Waymo/toyata/google drove cars niantic got it's players to take videos/pictures)
Align that point cloud to the 3d world, store it in a way that can be queried quickly (doing that quickly and at scale is still an area of research)
Then your client needs to extract the keypoints from an image and perform triangulation against the map to see where the camera was taken (There are calibration issues, but we ain't got time for that)
Now.
Niantic, from what I can see (and its been a while) has a database of key landmarks, but not of the areas inbetween. For decent navigation I would say that this is a massive problem.
I know niantic are pushing the whole "spatial world model" but frankly I don't think that scales. They stuff they have released is memorybound in vGPUs which isn't that useful for realtime querying.
I strongly suspect that actually they have a different system, much more traditional along the lines of colmap, or hloc, or something with a feedforward model in it.
However for the drone usercase, what you actually want is SLAM, which is a very different problem. for SLAM you need to build the map whilst your are moving, and then try and do loop closure or some other method to stop drift. Once you've gone there and back you can use that model for relocaliosation.
The map went to offense. Nobody needs scans of someone else's country for "defense".
At this point it's a given that any data source that can bring an edge in a conflict is being used for exactly that. Things that film and scan surroundings are the newest addition. When a fleet of cars is taking cm or mm resolution scans of entire cities or even countries the safe assumption is that the data is funneled for intelligence and military purposes.
I mean, we have a lot of weird shit going down right now... like AI being used to automate art BEFORE it's being used to automate dangerous and menial jobs, but knowing that people are being killed with help from data generated by millions of kids and young adults playing a fun, cute videogame is just so freaking dark and weird.
We are a very strange species and I don't have a great deal of hope for our future.
I seriously loath, hate & despise everything about this digital panopticon world being constructed around us.
This is about players all over the world contributing scans of their own countries to US military, though.
Niantic has the benefit that they can steer "volunteers" to specific points, though.
I mean, you can blame whoever you want, even Pikachu. Neither Niantic nor even one person cares who you blame.
Enter AI, a new era of soulless wonder.
Intelligentia Artificiosa.
Ingenium Artificum.
— Dreams of Silicon and Sorrow
It's dual, but its positive aspects are only unlocked after a sufficient human blood sacrifice is made by its overlords, as is the case with all dual use tech.
Pokémon Go was released at the beginning of July 2016. A week later, the Air Force kicked off its Red Flag exercise in Nellis AFB outside of Vegas. For the several thousand active duty folks participating, this is a month-long TDY from their normal base to Vegas. The premise is a large-scale war simulation, and it encompasses essentially all major wartime functions. I was directly involved in supporting drone operations (including live strikes) during this exercise.
The thing that’s funny about your comment is that because Pokémon go was just launched a week prior, a huge percentage of the participants were playing it in their downtime between exercises. You have to understand: these are thousands of 20/30-somethings (and occasionally even teenagers), meeting back up with friends from all over the world in Vegas. On and off base, people are socializing, having fun, and playing games. While phones were limited to outside of SCIFs, most of the base had no such restrictions. I recall wandering around base at 2am with friends playing it.
What’s funny is the same was happening with our deployed friends as well at the same time. This was a game that all their friends back home were playing, and when deployed, you need all the morale you can get. There were technically OPSEC policies this all probably violated but this was before any blowback from Strava accidentally revealing military bases or other similar incidents, so there was no specific guidance or moratorium on it.
All this to say, I understand what you’re trying to arrive at via deduction, but I think your understanding of the world in this case may be a bit too limited to meaningfully speak to this. That said, is the headline sensationalist? Probably.
Currently active theaters. And now there are detailed locations of our cities. We might not get killbots today but we will get pacificationbots.
If you’ve played the game, the scanning function is only for what they call Pokestops: These are points of interest that you can walk to and get items in the game. The game gives you points if you walk in a circle around one and take a short video.
They’re relatively sparse. At most, they captured some 3D models of some things like signs, small landmarks (up close) and the fronts of some buildings.
The images captured by something like Google Maps are a million times more useful for someone trying to construct a world model with a lot of coverage. The Pokémon Go captures would be useful if you wanted something like a detailed 3D scan of the sign in front the student building or something.
But presumably the images/models at ground level can be used to train/improve the general performance of Vantor's aerial (satelite based) navigation system so it works better elsewhere?
Is Pokémon Go not played in the Middle East, India, Taiwan, Korea or Japan?
There's even a Pokemon exclusive to the middle east region: sandstorm pattern Vivillion. Lots of players there.
For now.
Also in that worldview, we have the responsibility to defend innocent children. Let's if they can follow their own moral code and outlaw this surveillance to protect our kids.
Pokémon Go can be pretty expensive with micro-transactions.
For the company, it’s a stretch but tenable. Saying the “founder has CIA roots” solely because they took an In-Q-Tel cheque is just wrong.
Same mentality.
If someone claimed to have a CIA background solely on the basis that In-Q-Tel funded their mapping software, they'd be a charlatan. Just as a guy selling toilet paper to the CIA is not necessarily someone embedded in the intelligence community.
Even 100s of yummy grandma-cheeseburgers is not worth feeding private data brokers detailed maps of our own communities.
Nowadays some of them are just as likely to sell the data to the other side.
Nowadays the other side may get access to them without us even knowing.
Guns feed families and protect people too.
They are dual use like all tech from knives to nukes.
MapComplete is a nice alternative if you care about some part of the map that are not easily filterable by StreetComplethttps://mapcomplete.org/
Normal players would have noticed the bandwidth and CPU usage, and volunteers have already agreed to data sharing, so there's no point in keeping secrets. Same as claims that the Facebook app listens to people talk: someone would have caught it by now.
Also, AR capture was never very popular, mostly a gimmick for new players. The game was already a battery and power hog even without it.
Hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players spent years filming the streets, parks, and buildings around them to earn in-game rewards. Those roughly 30 billion environmental scans are now owned by Niantic Spatial, and they helped train a camera-based navigation model that a U.S. defense contractor is preparing to put into drones and other military robots. Most of the players had no idea.
The pipeline runs from a mobile game to the battlefield in three steps. Players scanned the physical world. Niantic Spatial turned those scans into a 3D map that lets a machine locate itself by sight when satellite signals fail. And in December 2025, Niantic Spatial announced a partnership with Vantor, the defense and intelligence firm formerly known as Maxar Intelligence, to fuse that ground-level system with Vantor’s aerial navigation software for use in GPS-denied operations.
I have spent years covering how drones lose their way the moment an electronic warfare unit switches on a jammer, a problem that has spread from the battlefield into civilian airspace, from Ukrainian workshops cycling through navigation generations to American programs scrambling for alternatives. The unsettling part of this story is not the technology. It is where the training data came from, and whether the people who supplied it would have agreed had anyone explained the destination.
Since 2021, Pokémon Go has asked players to record short videos of real-world locations, called Pokéstops, to earn extra in-game items. Scanning all the buildings, streets, and trees in a 360-degree sweep was optional, and Niantic asked separately for permission to keep the footage. Granting it meant agreeing to extra terms.
Those terms handed Niantic a transferable, sublicensable license to the scans, meaning the company could resell the imagery to third parties. Floris De Hingh, a 34-year-old Dutch player who downloaded the game on its first available day in 2016, told Trouw he never connected the footage he captured to a system that would steer military drones. “I was just playing a game,” he said. He had even scanned the inside of his own apartment.
The collected scans, around 30 billion of them according to Trouw, became the raw material for a Visual Positioning System, or VPS. Where GPS depends on a satellite signal, VPS works out where a camera is by matching what it sees against a detailed 3D model of the world. Two recognizable reference points a few pixels wide can be enough to fix a location. Niantic Spatial CTO Brian McClendon, who previously led the team behind Google Maps, Google Earth, and Street View, has said the approach suits robots operating where GPS regularly drops out, such as dense cities, and where signals are deliberately blocked, such as war zones.
The Vantor partnership, announced on December 16, 2025, joins two positioning systems into one. Niantic Spatial handles localization on the ground by aligning a camera feed against its model. Vantor’s Raptor software, launched in February 2025, does the same job in the air using a drone’s camera and Vantor’s proprietary 3D terrain data. Combined, the companies say, a drone overhead and a vehicle or dismounted operator below can share the same coordinates in real time with no satellite link. The principle is already turning up on the other side of the front, where a downed Russian drone was found matching live camera feeds against preloaded terrain imagery rather than trusting a single GPS module.
Vantor’s own framing is blunt about the problem it targets. The joint release names GPS “unavailability, spoofing, interference, and jamming” as the vulnerability, and lists autonomous drones, vehicles, augmented reality glasses, and other field assets as the platforms meant to run on the shared system. Niantic Spatial’s go-to-market lead told defense outlet Tectonic the goal is thousands of devices operating on one coordinate framework in an electronic-warfare-heavy environment. Field testing of the integrated system is planned for early 2026.
Vantor is not a startup dabbling in defense. Rebranded from Maxar Intelligence on October 1, 2025, it is a prime contractor to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, holding a follow-on award worth $70 million under the agency’s Global Enhanced GEOINT Delivery program, which serves more than 400,000 U.S. government users. This is a company built around national security imagery, now adding GPS-independent navigation to its catalog.
Asked directly whether the military-bound system relies on Pokémon Go imagery, Vantor told Trouw it would not use the game’s data. The company then declined to say whether the model it plans to deploy was trained on those scans in the past. Niantic Spatial, responding to earlier questions about a separate deal, said the scans were used to train an “early version” of its navigation model. On the defense partnership specifically, the company said it had no new information to share.
That gap is the heart of the dispute. Jeroen van den Hoven, a professor of ethics and technology at TU Delft, told Trouw the conclusion is hard to avoid. “Without the huge number of scans from all those gamers, the development of this system would never have progressed so quickly,” he said. He added that AI models begin with a dataset and then absorb far more data until the original contributions blur into patterns that can no longer be traced. Once a scan is folded into the model, in other words, proving it is or is not in there becomes nearly impossible.
Van den Hoven did not condemn battlefield VPS outright. If it helps Ukraine win a just war against an aggressor, he said, that is a good development. His worry is the system falling into the wrong hands, and the broader pattern of players being misled about where their data goes. He called the episode a red flag.
The military turn looks less like a swerve once you trace the company’s lineage. Niantic grew out of Keyhole, a geographic data firm that took funding in 2003 from In-Q-Tel, the venture arm financed by the CIA. An In-Q-Tel release from that year stated Keyhole’s services were used to support U.S. troops during the Iraq War. Google bought Keyhole the following year, and Keyhole CEO John Hanke went on to lead the team behind Google Maps, Google Earth, and Street View.
Hanke formed Niantic Labs inside Google in 2010, then spun it out in 2015. The company collected camera imagery from players once before, through its 2014 game Ingress, using the same method later applied in Pokémon Go. In 2025 the structure split again: Scopely, owned by Saudi Arabia’s Savvy Games Group and ultimately the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund, acquired Niantic’s games business for $3.5 billion in a deal that closed in late May, while the technology platform spun off as the standalone Niantic Spatial under Hanke. The games went to a Saudi sovereign wealth fund. The map went to defense.
Pokémon Go is not the only camera in your pocket feeding a map. Meta’s smart glasses continuously scan a wearer’s surroundings, Apple’s AR hardware builds 3D models of interiors, and Waymo’s self-driving cars reconstruct detailed street layouts. Niantic Spatial has signaled interest in more indoor footage specifically, and in March 2025 it announced a deal with Coco Robotics to guide delivery robots already rolling through U.S. cities and Helsinki.
Iris Muis, a data-ethics expert at Utrecht University’s Data School, framed the trap plainly: a user cannot picture how their data might be used later. Maybe in five years there is an application with effects you fundamentally disagree with. British game designer Adrian Hon has gone further, advising Pokémon Go players to stop making scans and consider smaller games less likely to resell data. De Hingh, who quit the game over a year ago because he was tired of the updates rather than the data terms, called the news an enormous eye-opener. “A game should stay a game,” he said.
The navigation problem this solves is real, and DroneXL has documented it from the trenches. When I wrote about Ukraine’s FirePoint in March, the detail that stuck was not the 200 strike drones a day. It was that the company had built seven generations of navigation systems in roughly three years, landing on a terrain-matching setup that uses a cheap night camera to fly without GPS. Russia can jam GPS. It cannot jam a drone that does not need it. Visual positioning is the same insight, scaled up and packaged for export.
So I am not going to pretend GPS-denied navigation is sinister on its face. It is one of the most important capability gaps in the industry, the reason Shield AI’s V-BAT keeps flying when radio links die, the reason the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance evaluations are adding GPS denial to Phase II this year. The discomfort here is narrower and sharper. The training data came from people who thought they were catching Pikachu, under a license most never read, sold up a chain that ends at a sovereign wealth fund and a defense prime. Consent obtained for a game is not consent for a weapons program, even if the end use turns out to be defensible.
Vantor’s non-answer is what I would watch. The company says it will not use Pokémon Go data and refuses to say whether the model it is fielding was already trained on it. Those are not the same statement, and the difference is the whole story. Van den Hoven is right that once scans are baked into a model, tracing them back is close to impossible, which conveniently makes the denial unfalsifiable. The early-2026 field tests will tell us whether this air-to-ground system is real or a press release. They will not tell us whose footage is inside the model, and so far nobody at either company will.
Sources: Trouw, Volkskrant.
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
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AFB = air force base
TDY = temporary duty
SCIF = sensitive compartmented information facility
OPSEC = operational security
Visual navigation is prone to degradation. Keeping the "map" updated requires constant visits. (I know because my team worked on the patent for a method for updating said maps.)
Also Pacification bot would be run by the military who most lilkey have GPS.
Finally, For ground based bots, SLAM is actually more useful, rather than pre-built map based navigation.
i think killbots are absolutely a possibility, and very soon.
rightwing pundits and meme makers are already unironically quoting Zechariah 13:8
That has already existed for decades.
I feel like users and readers instinctively know these limitations. We work with digital maps all the time that are out-of-date. Google and Apple don't and can't know any and all road closure and vehicle accidents in real time. Your car's radar road mapping service is as up-to-date as anything, but you still may be the first person to ever encounter a sinkhole or pothole that just appeared and it won't be on the map until you discover it. Satellite data is even more out of date because it can't be as frequently updated. There aren't anywhere near as many sensors in orbit or aerially as there are on the ground.
I haven't played PoGo in a while, but Niantic used to have human moderators and also tried to crowd-source some quality control on these world models because they knew 99% of the scans they received were bunk, either of nothing, the wrong thing, the right thing but in the dark or from an obstructed angle. I have no idea how good a job they ever did of cleaning that up, but it's a difficult task and it's never done because the world is always changing. There's only so much you can do here. Technology isn't magic.
ofc going by the entire surface of the earth its not a lot of places, but i would never call such a thing statistically insignificant..
If GP has access to this dataset it would be interesting to know how sparse is the data in that area.
The Pokémon Go data is for small little islands around their points of interest (pokestops).
It’s not a detailed city map. The data is extremely sparse and only covers little tiny bubble around their sparse in game POIs.
The way it was represented as some sort of high resolution city map or world model was quite ridiculous.
Pessimistically, maybe democracy's days are numbered
There are clear parallels in the modern world of societies when the ruling machinery doesn't need those things from their population - petrostates. The people in these states tend to be viewed as subjects, not citizens. That's where we are headed
A corporate council of emperor kings with armies of pacification bots. The tiny sliver of window we have to ensure this doesn't happen is rapidly closing and there seems to be no movement toward ensuring that this doesn't culminate with the entire power of this new revolution in the hands of a small class of near demigods.
It almost 1-1 data correlation, n-phone Pokémon go scans of a location helping a drone locate itself in the same location in correlation with Maxar’s satellite data.
There maybe some hyper corner case uses. Maybe the billion scans in New York City help them generalize across different phone lenses characteristics, but phone and drone lenses are so different.
Would love to hear some specifics if I’m wrong here.
"get data for drone warfare" ...in 2021 (before the russian invasion...)
but did we even EXPECT drone warfare to influence the war THIS MUCH back then?
well not me -- I actually thought russia would beat the crap out of ukraine within a month (even after the failed spetsnaz attack on zelensky)
the article's assumptions only makes sense IF some people had time machines, or if CIA has some know-everything future prophet
(not to mention: drones need TOP TO BOTTOM view, not bottom-to-top view)
anyway, my verdict: sensational yellow journal article, nothing more/less
The only place I can imagine is maybe Ukrainian drones in Russia. Still, not a tonne of data there to be useful (as compared to say Tokyo or New York).
Maxar is/was primarily a satellite data company, and to say Pokemon data would add any major value in any of today's active drone deployments with the level of Satellite coverage Maxar already has is a wide stretch.
Moreover, ground forces in the area would need pretty heavy jamming tech in place too for this kind of data to be useful. It's a sliver of a sliver of a sliver situation.
That gets you good navigation around landmarks, but when you go further away, you get less usable feature points, as they are closer together you get more position error/need higher resolution cameras.
The intermediate places gives you the precise consistent navigation.
It's a feature of open data, it's open and usable by anyone.
That's not the impression I get from the TV ads.
The ads they run show people walking along sidewalks and through forested paths and through parks in AR mode.
that was in the cards in the early 2000s when the Patriot Act got passed, mate.
now they just have the muscle (drones) to back it up.
welcome to the cyberpunk dystopia
I was able to create a full 3d model of my window plant almost free of obscured areas from a few dozens still photos taken all around it, back in 2018, using the Capturing Reality photogrammetry app on a mobile i7-3610QM CPU with 8Gb RAM, in about 40-60 minutes.
And that's pretty mundane general public software, do we know for sure which algorithms are used by Niantic?
I'd say... the versatility of photos provides the "ground truth" on its own when combined to one single dataset. Say you want to program a guided drone shooting through urban areas, you want it to work under all sorts of conditions - day, night, rain, snow, the sun visible from all possible angles and throwing shadows.
A dataset that you can get from something like Street View? You can at best generate that once a year at enormous expense. Still valuable because a Street View car likely has a multitude of highest-quality GNSS receivers and possibly RTK navigation aids, but to make the dataset usable for 24/7/365 navigation you absolutely need a huge, huge amount of backfill.
The headline, which I do understand is in question, talks about training, not using the scans as a database. It is likely that you are right that the scans are not being used to provide localization data, but that is also not what the headline is pointing to.
The headline specifically speaks to using the scans for training. While I do not have any inside baseball, the problem space is often solved using neural nets and other machine learning algorithms. On the surface it seems likely that they would benefit from training data that doesn't necessarily need to be from where the conflict is actually taking place. A base world model, for example, can be developed from data collected anywhere in the world. Its is not an entirely different universe when you step into another country.
But you are suggesting that the algorithms used are entirely classical (i.e. no AI/ML)?
If this is happening it would be easy to detect by the upload bandwidth spiking during AR mode.
The 3D scan mode is a specific feature you have to use in the app that uploads 100s of megabytes afterward. It advises you to go on WiFi to do it.
If the AR mode was secretly uploading images that would be a scandal in itself.
there was a startup that pitched the idea of using Satellite data to do ground based navigation. (https://sturfee.com/vps) they didn't get bought out by either google, niantic or facebook, so it can't of worked that well.
Niantic's stuff is a pre-built map that the client will reference to get a position. Its essentially a massive feature matching exercise. The problem with using airborn photos is that you miss a bunch of features you can't see. (samy thing trying to match ground features from the air.)
THe lens calibration issue isn't actually that much of a problem _for the client_. if you have a rough idea of the lens (exif data really helps there) then you can still get meter accurate (and a few degrees heading) its a bit more of a problem for generating the initial map, but Structure from motion with good motion priors goes a long way to make it less of a problem
Now, Niantic are proposing that you can train a model that can relocalize generally without a detailed map, I think thats a bit far fetch, especially to do at any large scale. (ie bigger than a cubic kilometer)
All of them but Japan?
MEA has stuff going on beyond Iran, Lebanon or whatever country the US decides to invade this week. India has two nuclear neighbours with border disputes and weekly scuffles, sometimes a downed jet fighter or two. Taiwan is probably the biggest geopolitical tension/war/invasion possibility of our time. Korea is in a stalemate unfinished war for decades. Japan has its own very real dispute scenarios with China.
I know drone scans from Pokemon Go probably won't help in the Himalayas or South China Sea, but those regions are far from trouble free
But what I mean is that there are enough players there to be significant part of the ecosystem. The war made obtaining those Vivillion harder.
According to Wikipedia, more than half of the Middle East countries are either belligerents or were otherwise attacked in the ongoing war.
Ground drones however are targeted by the FPV drones (wired or radio controlled), so the new thing is to have a thing with automatic targeting to shoot those. Then again, I at least heard about using something open-cv (yes, some of those run actual linux) shaped on the FPV drone itself, as it really helps with the amount of jamming going on.
but... drones? that's just yellow journalism optimized for SEO keyword (and anyone who clicks an article with 'drone')
I am a daily player, I have scanned something once, the rewards were minuscule, I never did it again. I have that specific vivillon which was hard to get because not many players were from the relevant area even before the current events, and I just can't see how the war is related to any of this.
What time you have in mind, that was really better?
(I believe the 90s were at least way more optimistic)
> “We tried it,” says drone-maker[…]. “It’s a test. We never implemented it [more widely].”
You can connect any two things into a sentence regardless of the state of the world. This is way off of where the problems actually are.
Edit: Some people have downvoted this without giving a reason, but I'm going to double down. Any time you have disasters or large crimes, you can connect them to children and children's things. Thinking there's anything to learn about the specific fact that you can make that connection is a mistake. It's letting the real problem spill over in a way that misleads your common sense. It's an inherent part of bad things happening that they also affect children. No matter what state the world is in.
“We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” says Kokhanovskyy. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.”
Works less well if you want to use structures for radar cover.
This time you have an actual connection, the state of the world notwithstanding. If you factor in the world however, with this many wars, I'd say it's pretty much linked, regardless of the way you assembled words to make it look like it doesn't, and doubling down doesn't make it less distant from reality.
Civilians dying in an armed conflict doesn't cut the definition of warcrime by itself. Deliberate targeting and intentional destruction of civil infrastructure that supports life or something like it is.
Then of course there is stuff that ICC isn't getting busy about which is clearly above the threshold -- the regular drone safaris in and around Kherson (city with pre-war population circa quarter million people) happening for the last few years.
Everything! Everything! Like all the deer, all the rabbits, all the decoys! Obviously we trust Kokhanovskyy
How likely is your opinion to change in the light of the information that, according to the article, it's Ukraine who uses these drones?
The ICC judges have less real-world power than a Pop Idol judge.
The ICC only works if every nation plays by the rules. Fewer and fewer do these days.