Live data from Hacker News

Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones

dronexl.co

261–270 of 334 posts

Re: Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones

#261
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure Pokemon Go and Ingress was played in Kiev long before the war

This is a good point. Legacy data might be the most valueable here

not really, in war, where there has been lots of changes, the maps degrade pretty quickly.

Re: Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones

#262

As someone who works in this space, the headline is a bit of a stretch. The overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone heavy theaters of war is a tiny sliver (or zero?). The military contractor (Vantar/Maxar) in question basically admits so but just "reserves the right" to use the data which is the political battle line ala Claude and DoD. This is mostly an ideological battle.

""As someone who works in this space, the headline is a bit of a stretch. The overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone heavy theaters of war is a tiny sliver (or zero?)."" Can you elaborate? GPS can be faulty in cities. Pokémon Go scans, are primarily in cities. The mapping in the article, is specifically saying to use visual cues when GPS is faulty. How is this not directly 1-1 overlap…

VPSs are much more effective at navigation at ground level in cities compared to GPS because of multi-path interference.

However that data has a half life and needs to be refreshed.

For flying drones, ground level data is really not that useful. mainly because you can't see it, because its obscured by trees, building and clouds.

But, this is not a new thing. Google, Apple, facebook and niantic all have VPSs as do a bunch of other startups.

For Drones you will probably need SLAM to capture the map, and then once you have the initial map, you can keep it updated.

You can experiment at home using https://github.com/colmap

Re: Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the data was spatial - shapes and layouts of buildings and streets and such - that dataset is no longer current.

Deeply sickening that modern society is such that we have to make room in our brains for objectively outlandish connections like these. That a children's cartoon and game about cute little companions has to in any way be involved in the same sentence as the flattening of a city and genocide is just... pure insanity. The world has truly, collectively, lost its fucking mind.

"The world has truly, collectively, lost its fucking mind."

What time you have in mind, that was really better?

(I believe the 90s were at least way more optimistic)

Re: Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones

#264

How useful is spatial data over time, does it decay or age much? Is the geographical data more useful, or are buildings and other structures more important? Genuinely don't know much in this space.

Its using Visual descriptors to generate a pointcloud. Buildings and text are really great for creating descriptors, so when they change you loose key points for "localizing"(ie getting your position). This needs to be updated as those buildings change.

You also need a day/night dataset (although some newer descriptors are day/night resistant)

Re: Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And now there are detailed locations of our cities. The Pokémon Go data is for small little islands around their points of interest (pokestops). It’s not a detailed city map. The data is extremely sparse and only covers little tiny bubble around their sparse in game POIs. The way it was represented as some sort of high resolution city map or world model was quite ridiculous.

The Pokémon Go data is for small little islands around their points of interest (pokestops). That's not the impression I get from the TV ads. The ads they run show people walking along sidewalks and through forested paths and through parks in AR mode.

The controversy elsewhere in these comments is over whether it’s recording, and the server is slurping up, the video footage, during AR mode. We know they do so on the “scans” they have you do, where you walk around something taking video, but I don’t think there’s proof that having AR on = uploading to the server. Should be easy to prove one way or the other by observing bandwidth usage.

Re: Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones

#267
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess nuclear weapons were just inevitable the moment the first quarks were assembled into a proton, right?

if it can be used to murder people it will be. the only reason we dont have antimatter weapons or gravity guns is because we haven't figured out how.

We have international treaties that ban biological and chemical weapons. Other weapons that are regulated include anti-personnel mines, cluster bombs, and blinding lasers. Expanding bullets are banned in military uses as are incendiary weapons against civilian targets.

That's the state today. Throughout history there's been a long negotiation about what weapons have been allowed in combat.

Re: Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones

#268
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the EU has demonstrated for decades that by balancing trades, equality and human rights it can prevent conflicts from happening. Seems to me that most of our friends in the balkans that have memory of the past wars are overall pretty happy about the current state of things, and there hasn't been wars to contend Alsace-Lorraine in 80 years, is it a record already? War is very much not a given in the civilized world

To be more precise, two decades, from 1999 when EU countries bombed Yugoslavia and occupied Kosovo.

They also instigated and executed the coup in Libya.

Re: Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone-driven Theaters of War would be a tiny sliver Is Pokémon Go not played in the Middle East, India, Taiwan, Korea or Japan?

Which of those are active theaters of war? Pokemon Go wasn't that big in Iran or Lebanon and even there, there aren't any reports of significant drones deployed there. The only place I can imagine is maybe Ukrainian drones in Russia. Still, not a tonne of data there to be useful (as compared to say Tokyo or New York).

>Which of those are active theaters of war?

All of them but Japan?

MEA has stuff going on beyond Iran, Lebanon or whatever country the US decides to invade this week. India has two nuclear neighbours with border disputes and weekly scuffles, sometimes a downed jet fighter or two. Taiwan is probably the biggest geopolitical tension/war/invasion possibility of our time. Korea is in a stalemate unfinished war for decades. Japan has its own very real dispute scenarios with China.

I know drone scans from Pokemon Go probably won't help in the Himalayas or South China Sea, but those regions are far from trouble free

Re: Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the data was spatial - shapes and layouts of buildings and streets and such - that dataset is no longer current.

Deeply sickening that modern society is such that we have to make room in our brains for objectively outlandish connections like these. That a children's cartoon and game about cute little companions has to in any way be involved in the same sentence as the flattening of a city and genocide is just... pure insanity. The world has truly, collectively, lost its fucking mind.

> in any way

You can connect any two things into a sentence regardless of the state of the world. This is way off of where the problems actually are.

Edit: Some people have downvoted this without giving a reason, but I'm going to double down. Any time you have disasters or large crimes, you can connect them to children and children's things. Thinking there's anything to learn about the specific fact that you can make that connection is a mistake. It's letting the real problem spill over in a way that misleads your common sense. It's an inherent part of bad things happening that they also affect children. No matter what state the world is in.

Post reply on HN