Niantic Labs has finally unveiled their massive plan for the Pokemon Go data they collected. Well, some of it.
Two years ago, Niantic revealed plans to build a new AI model based on real life geographic data. They got this data from Pokemon Go players, but they didn’t use all that data as some might want you to believe.
As they disclosed back then, they only used scans that players had to agree to make themselves, and only for publicly accessible locations. So Niantic didn’t use, for example, data on how many steps you took or all the locations you went to.
If you played AR Mapping Field Research, that was the data Niantic used. That date built a model called a visual positioning system (VPS), which tries to ‘fill in the blanks’ of what data was not scanned.
There were some fears of what Niantic was going to do with this data, particularly when they sold Pokemon Go and their other games to Scopely.
The MIT Technology Review reports that Niantic brought their VPS to Coco, a robotics delivery company. At least for now, that data is being used to speed up food deliveries. And that’s it.