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Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

nianticlabs.com

141–150 of 365 posts

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#141

Conversation about ‘players are the product’ of Pokémon go aside… What are some practical applications of an LGM? Seems like navigation is ‘solved’? There’s already a lot of technology supporting permanence of virtual objects based on spatial mapping? Better AI generated animations? I am sure there are a ton of innovations it could unlock…

I hope this tech could help make AR glasses more useful in public, day-to-day life, like a video game HUD.

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because not everyone is a seasoned IT professional.

I don't think you need to be an "IT professional" to understand that not paying money doesn't imply that you aren't giving away value.

This is disingenuous. They charge for gems and this model is well understood to make a fortune without selling user data at all

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#143
I still don't get what LGM is. From what I understood, it isn't actually about any "geospatial" data at all, is it? It is rather about improving some vision models to predict how the backside of a building looks, right? And training data isn't of people walking, but from images they've produced while catching pokemons or something?

P.S.: Also, if that's indeed what they mean, I wonder why having google street view data isn't enough for that.

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google actually has released weights for some of their models, but judging by the fact that this model is potentially valuable, they likely will not allow Niantic for this which is totally unfair, every niantic player should have access to all the stuff because they collectively made it

> which is totally unfair, every niantic player should have access to all the stuff because they collectively made it I don't understand this perspective. While all players may have collectively made this model possible, no individual player could make a model like it based on their contributions alone. Since no single player could replicate this outcome based on only their data, does it not imply that there's value…

Most of your analysis is flawed because the model is non-rivalrous so it could easily be given to every player.

Additionally, many people can contribute to make something greater that benefits everyone (see open source). So the argument of “you couldn’t have done this on your own” also doesn’t hold any water.

The only thing that protects niantic is just a shitty ToS like the rest of the games that nobody pays attention to. There is nothing fundamentally “right” about what they did.

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#145

Conversation about ‘players are the product’ of Pokémon go aside… What are some practical applications of an LGM? Seems like navigation is ‘solved’? There’s already a lot of technology supporting permanence of virtual objects based on spatial mapping? Better AI generated animations? I am sure there are a ton of innovations it could unlock…

"It could help with search and rescue" jokes aside [1] this seems really useful for robotics. Their demo video is estimating a camera position from a single image, after learning the scene from a couple images. Stick the camera on a robot, and you are now estimating where the robot is based on what the robot has seen before.

They are a bit vague on what else the model does, but it sounds like they extrapolate what the rest of the environment could look like, the same way you can make a good guess what the back side of that rock would look like. That gives autonomous robots a baseline they can use to plan actions (like how to drive/fly/crawl to the other side) that can be updated as new view points become available.

1: https://www.xkcd.com/2128/

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#146
post #20

This is pretty cool, but I feel as a pokehunter (Pokemon Go player), I have been tricked into working to contribute training data so that they can profit off my labor. How? They consistently incentivize you to scan pokestops (physical locations) through "research tasks" and give you some useful items as rewards. The effort is usually much more significant than what you get in return, so I have stopped doing it. It's…

Imagine how those of us who played Ingress (Niantic's first game) feel... We were tricked into contributing location data for the game we loved, only to see it reused for the far more popular (and profitable) Pokemon Go.

The Google - Niantic - Ingress - borg - kubernetes conspiracy must be unraveled

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#147
post #20

This is pretty cool, but I feel as a pokehunter (Pokemon Go player), I have been tricked into working to contribute training data so that they can profit off my labor. How? They consistently incentivize you to scan pokestops (physical locations) through "research tasks" and give you some useful items as rewards. The effort is usually much more significant than what you get in return, so I have stopped doing it. It's…

Imagine how those of us who played Ingress (Niantic's first game) feel... We were tricked into contributing location data for the game we loved, only to see it reused for the far more popular (and profitable) Pokemon Go.

Why would anyone take issue with this? Asking as someone who tried both games at different points.

Niantic was always open with the fact that they gather location data, particularly in places cars can't go - I remember an early blog post saying as much before they were unbundled from Google. No one was tricked, they were just not paying attention.

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#148
post #20

This is pretty cool, but I feel as a pokehunter (Pokemon Go player), I have been tricked into working to contribute training data so that they can profit off my labor. How? They consistently incentivize you to scan pokestops (physical locations) through "research tasks" and give you some useful items as rewards. The effort is usually much more significant than what you get in return, so I have stopped doing it. It's…

The game is free, there has to be some way for them to profit, interesting to see this was it.

This wasn’t it. It was from gems

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#150
It may not be Geospatial data at all and I'm not sure how much the users consented but the data collection strategy was well crafted. I remember recommending building a game to collect handwriting data from testers (about a thousand), to the research lab I worked for long time back.
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