Did you play Pokémon Go? You didn't know it, but you were training AI to map the world

You probably didn’t know it, but if you played or are still playing Pokémon Go (there are more than half a million active players), you were helping train an AI-powered geospatial model that aims to map the world.

A blog post from Niantic, the software developer behind the popular game, explains how it’s working on “a large geospatial model to achieve spatial intelligence” and trying to build a “visual positioning system” to understand the world around us — and it’s using data from Pokémon Go.

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To clarify, Niantic is saying that just like data on the web trains AI models, the AI model it’s building needs to understand 3D spaces. An immense amount of data and photographs of 3D spaces are available thanks to Pokémon Go players creeping around the world. 

Niantic explains it like this: A local AI mapping model might understand that a church stands at a specific place, but it’s likely only seen the front of that location and can’t explain what the rest of the church looks like. With data from Pokémon Go players, who have likely walked around many churches and trekked areas that cars can’t reach (and photographed those areas), the AI, now has a good guess at what a church generally looks like.

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The company also pointed out that it recently rolled out a new feature for the game called Pokémon Playground that lets you place a creature at a certain real-world spot for others to see. This means that placing the character and viewing it later conveniently involves using your camera, taking images from multiple angles, and sending the resulting image to Niantic. 

According to Niantic, it currently has 10 million scanned locations around the world, with one million of those activated and available for use in its VPS service. It added that it receives about 1 million fresh scans each week, each containing hundreds of images.

Niantic says it will use this data for purposes like AR glasses, robotics, content creation, and autonomous systems. So, not only did the company make money selling in-game items to players, but is also going to make money on the maps those players helped make.