Last week, Niantic announced plans to create an AI model for navigating the physical world using scans collected from players of its mobile games, such as Pokémon Go, and from users of its Scaniverse app, reports 404 Media.
All AI models require training data. So far, companies have collected data from websites, YouTube videos, books, audio sources, and more, but this is perhaps the first we’ve heard of AI training data collected through a mobile gaming app.
“Over the past five years, Niantic has focused on building our Visual Positioning System (VPS), which uses a single image from a phone to determine its position and orientation using a 3D map built from people scanning interesting locations in our games and Scaniverse,” wrote Niantic in a company blog post.