By Sickr on November 20, 2024

Pokemon GO developer Niantic announced on its blog that it has been busy building a Large Geospatial Model (LGM) to help the company achieve Spatial Intelligence. Games Developer says that Niantic's Large Geospatial Model, which uses machine learning to "understand a scene and connect it to millions of other scenes globally." However, it seems the data for this Language Model has come from unwitting Pokemon GO players around the world. Those who haven't read the mobile game's terms and conditions will be unaware of the geospatial technology and player recordings which are on by default and can be opted out from. LGM is built on the studio's Visual Positioning System and its goal is to enable Niantic to "implement a shared understanding of geographic locations, and comprehending places yet to be fully scanned" which companies could presumably use.

"Similar to a Large Language Model (LLM), Niantic's model scrapes data from real-world locations, and it hopes to use the technology to "enable computers not only to perceive and understand physical spaces, but also to interact with them in new ways." And what makes its data more substantial than something like Google Maps or Street is the point of view: as Niantic notes, the data is "taken from a pedestrian perspective and includes places inaccessible to cars." - Game Developer.com

Source / Via / Via