81–90 of 334 posts
This shouldn't be a surprise. But at this point it feels like if you don't completely avoid participating in digital society, your data will be used against you or groups/countries you support.
I am conflicted on this report.
1) VPS is not new, the startup I worked at had a working public system in 2018.
2) The hard part about VPSs is not actually the navigation, its generating and querying the map.
How does the VPS work?
You build a point cloud of features (for us we paid people to go and record videos in cities, Tesla/Waymo/toyata/google drove cars niantic got it's players to take videos/pictures)
Align that point cloud to the 3d world, store it in a way that can be queried quickly (doing that quickly and at scale is still an area of research)
Then your client needs to extract the keypoints from an image and perform triangulation against the map to see where the camera was taken (There are calibration issues, but we ain't got time for that)
Now.
Niantic, from what I can see (and its been a while) has a database of key landmarks, but not of the areas inbetween. For decent navigation I would say that this is a massive problem.
I know niantic are pushing the whole "spatial world model" but frankly I don't think that scales. They stuff they have released is memorybound in vGPUs which isn't that useful for realtime querying.
I strongly suspect that actually they have a different system, much more traditional along the lines of colmap, or hloc, or something with a feedforward model in it.
However for the drone usercase, what you actually want is SLAM, which is a very different problem. for SLAM you need to build the map whilst your are moving, and then try and do loop closure or some other method to stop drift. Once you've gone there and back you can use that model for relocaliosation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good point, maybe that could be done. But that's not what TFA is about, so you're not vindicated yet.
Yeah and for niantic to achieve good photogrammetry with their random collection of photos taken from different angles, on different days, etc they would need some kind of ground truth to train on, which is implausible. You'd need to collect a parallel dataset of high-quality videos for traditional photogrammetry and .. hang on.
I'd say... the versatility of photos provides the "ground truth" on its own when combined to one single dataset. Say you want to program a guided drone shooting through urban areas, you want it to work under all sorts of conditions - day, night, rain, snow, the sun visible from all possible angles and throwing shadows.
A dataset that you can get from something like Street View? You can at best generate that once a year at enormous expense. Still valuable because a Street View car likely has a multitude of highest-quality GNSS receivers and possibly RTK navigation aids, but to make the dataset usable for 24/7/365 navigation you absolutely need a huge, huge amount of backfill.
This article is based on reporting from Trouw: https://www.trouw.nl/redactie/PokemonGo/ I was interviewed for the Trouw piece and briefly quoted. This isn't to detract from the DroneXL piece, which adds its own angle.
And what can be done? The comments usually say a big fat nothing.
- Any fool already knew this comments: “shouldn’t be a surprise”
- I guess I should call my representative comments
- Just boycot tech comments
Usually nothing much actionable. Building the Ad/Surveillance/Privacy Invasion society? Very actionable, good pay, many mouths fed and FIRE accomplished by HN posters. There’s even at least one acronym for this life achievement.
Shoutout to digital activists that are doing something. I’m but an armchair complainer on this front.
Insane. People literally traded military intelligence for Pokémon.
The map went to offense. Nobody needs scans of someone else's country for "defense".
At this point it's a given that any data source that can bring an edge in a conflict is being used for exactly that. Things that film and scan surroundings are the newest addition. When a fleet of cars is taking cm or mm resolution scans of entire cities or even countries the safe assumption is that the data is funneled for intelligence and military purposes.
Spyware company spawns a new spyware company.
An interesting thing is that in Russia, this military data grab by ostensibly 'our western would-be enemies" was supported by viral advertisement by nobody else but the head of Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill. A story was manufactured about arresting a 22 y.o. guy in the Church on Blood in Honour of All Saints for playing Pokemon Go. The story went hyper-hyped for weeks, with general public sentiment that o…
Interesting: the Russians are calling "our partners", "our would-be enemies" now. They're not even pretending anymore. Given that this steady parade of seemingly-planted and promoted derogatory anti-Western stories that has been happening for years originates from You Know Where, it's a revelation that the Russian establishment and secret services are not even pretending anymore. It should also be pointed out that Ki…