https://nianticlabs.com/news/largegeospatialmodel
https://archive.is/AxAhd
Niantic: Building a Large Geospatial Model to Achieve Spatial Intelligence (using Pokemon GO data)
Editor’s note: We use player-contributed scans of public real-world locations to help build our Large Geospatial Model. This scanning feature is completely optional – people have to visit a specific publicly-accessible location and click to scan. This allows Niantic to deliver new types of AR experiences for people to enjoy. Merely walking around playing our games does not train an AI model.
At Niantic, we are pioneering the concept of a Large Geospatial Model that will use large-scale machine learning to understand a scene and connect it to millions of other scenes globally.
When you look at a familiar type of structure – whether it’s a church, a statue, or a town square – it’s fairly easy to imagine what it might look like from other angles, even if you haven’t seen it from all sides. As humans, we have “spatial understanding” that means we can fill in these details based on countless similar scenes we’ve encountered before. But for machines, this task is extraordinarily difficult. Even the most advanced AI models today struggle to visualize and infer missing parts of a scene, or to imagine a place from a new angle. This is about to change: Spatial intelligence is the next frontier of AI models.
As part of Niantic’s Visual Positioning System (VPS), we have trained more than 50 million neural networks, with more than 150 trillion parameters, enabling operation in over a million locations. In our vision for a Large Geospatial Model (LGM), each of these local networks would contribute to a global large model, implementing a shared understanding of geographic locations, and comprehending places yet to be fully scanned.
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Our work so far
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.
With VPS, users can position themselves in the world with centimeter-level accuracy. That means they can see digital content placed against the physical environment precisely and realistically. This content is persistent in that it stays in a location after you’ve left, and it’s then shareable with others.For example, we recently started rolling out an experimental feature in Pokémon GO, called Pokémon Playgrounds, where the user can place Pokémon at a specific location, and they will remain there for others to see and interact with.
Niantic’s VPS is built from user scans, taken from different perspectives and at various times of day, at many times during the years, and with positioning information attached, creating a highly detailed understanding of the world. This data is unique because it is taken from a pedestrian perspective and includes places inaccessible to cars.
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5756204/the-cia-nsa-and-pok-mon-go
The CIA, NSA, and Pokémon Go
Let’s start with a little history
Way back in 2001, Keyhole, Inc. was founded by John Hanke (who previously worked in a “foreign affairs” position within the U.S. government). The company was named after the old “eye-in-the-sky” military satellites. One of the key, early backers of Keyhole was a firm called In-Q-Tel.
In-Q-Tel is the venture capital firm of the CIA. Yes, the Central Intelligence Agency. Much of the funding purportedly came from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). The NGA handles combat support for the U.S. Department of Defense and provides intelligence to the NSA and CIA, among others.
Keyhole’s noteworthy public product was “Earth.” Renamed to “Google Earth” after Google acquired Keyhole in 2004.
In 2010, Niantic Labs was founded (inside Google) by Keyhole’s founder, John Hanke.
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In 2015, Niantic was spun off from Google and became its own company. Then Pokémon Go was developed and launched by Niantic. It’s a game where you walk around in the real world (between locations suggested by the service) while holding your smartphone.