Pokémon Go players have unwittingly been mapping the world

Niantic shook the world with its smash hit, Pokémon Go, and now, it’s looking to leverage all the maps and image data it’s gained from that game into a large AI tool that will help robots and people with smart glasses with navigation.

The company published a blog post filled with jargon on the topic, but the idea is that, like a large language model that helps AI bots sound convincingly human, this large geospatial model can help robots navigate the world more convincingly. Niantic says, “It will enable computers not only to perceive and understand physical spaces but also to interact with them in new ways, forming a critical component of AR glasses and fields beyond, including robotics, content creation, and autonomous systems. As we move from phones to wearable technology linked to the real world, spatial intelligence will become the world’s future operating system.”

The company is hoping that training an AI on millions of geolocational images will allow the artificial intelligence to predict the world around it and make more informed choices when navigating. Niantic thinks it has a leg up on the competition as well since Pokémon Go players have helped map parts of the world inaccessible by cars.

There are no examples of this working just yet, but the idea has some credence, and since we’ve seen how transformational large language models have been for chatbots, it will be equally as interesting to see if this AI-enhanced location data helps with robot navigation or if it leads to weird digital hallucinations the same way large language models sometimes lead AI bots to saying lies confidently.

The other dark side of this mapping program is that Pokémon Go players were unaware that their gameplay was going used to map the world and it’s not something most players expected when they began playing the game in AR mode in 2016.

Source: Niantic Via: 404 Media