Nearly a decade after Pokémon Go transformed the real world into an augmented reality playground, the data collected from hundreds of millions of players is being repurposed to help autonomous delivery robots navigate city streets.
Popular Science reports that Niantic Spatial, part of the team behind the popular augmented reality game Pokémon Go, has announced a partnership with Coco Robotics, a company specializing in short-distance delivery robots for food and groceries. The collaboration will utilize Niantic’s Visual Positioning System, a navigation technology trained on more than 30 billion images captured by Pokémon Go users over the years, to help delivery robots navigate sidewalks and urban environments with unprecedented precision.
The Visual Positioning System can reportedly pinpoint location down to a few centimeters by analyzing nearby buildings and landmarks, offering a significant improvement over traditional GPS technology. This crowdsourced mapping effort represents one of the largest real-world data collection projects ever undertaken through a mobile gaming application, and demonstrates how user-generated content can be repurposed years after its initial collection.
“It turns out that getting Pikachu to realistically run around and getting Coco’s robot to safely and accurately move through the world is actually the same problem,” Niantic Spatial CEO John Hanke said in a recent interview with MIT Technology Review.
When Pokémon Go launched in 2016, it became a cultural phenomenon, attracting approximately 230 million monthly active players at its peak. The game prompted players to physically travel to specific locations and point their phone cameras at various angles while searching for virtual creatures superimposed onto real-world environments. While the game’s popularity has declined since its heyday, it still maintains around 50 million active users by some estimates.
The data collection effort received a significant boost in 2020 when Niantic added a feature called Field Research, which incentivized players to scan real-world statues and landmarks with their cameras in exchange for in-game rewards. Additional data reportedly came from areas designated as Pokémon battle arenas. These scans created detailed 3D models of the real world, capturing the same locations across varying weather conditions, lighting scenarios, angles, and heights.
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