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'Pokémon Go' players unknowingly trained delivery robots with 30B images

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Re: 'Pokémon Go' players unknowingly trained delivery robots with 30B images

#41

Post by KaiserPro »

dawnerd wrote: post #25
Aboutplants wrote: post #11

At what point will we have people transmit their car dash cams along with GPS information in order to generate more data? I’m actually surprised this hasn’t happened yet with self driving car manufacturers needing more and more data

Tesla does it and clearly it’s not all that useful in reality.

Thats because Tesla is useless, not because the data isn't valuable.

Tesla has explicitly ruled out using "HD maps" for autonomous vehicles. This means that all the data they have is going to not building maps, but building scenarios for testing its self driving models.

If you look at Wayve, they are building nerf maps to allow them to create scenarios for edge cases. all of that comes from the gathered data.

If you want to build visual navigation systems, you need lots of fresh data from all over. Seeding it with the data that naintic has is useful, but a lot of that data is out of date so not that useful anymore.

Re: 'Pokémon Go' players unknowingly trained delivery robots with 30B images

#44

Post by FrustratedMonky »

organsnyder wrote: post #20
abroszka33 wrote: post #7

I like Pokemon Go and play almost every day. I did this scan one time and then stopped. The rewards are not worth the hassle. I don't think many players are doing it. It's just very weird to stand somewhere and scan an object. I also wouldn't say 'unknowingly trained', it's pretty obvious what it does, and I think the game even tells you that they want to understands how the POI looks like in 3D.

My son showed me how he does these quests: he points the phone at the floor and just wiggles it back and forth.

exactly. that is why i doubt they will get actual navigable information out of it.

Re: 'Pokémon Go' players unknowingly trained delivery robots with 30B images

#45

Post by pavon »

organsnyder wrote: post #22
jeroenhd wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The privacy policy was just a generic corporate "we may collect some information to improve a service" crap. Technically, lawyers will argue that users had to opportunity to inform themselves. Practically, nobody knew.

The quests themselves are prominently labeled "AR mapping". You don't need to go into the privacy policy to know what they are.

It is not at all clear that the mapping is for purposes other than the AR features in the game itself though. In fact Niantic advertised the scanning field research as helping them make richer experience at PokeStops (which they did).

Niantic was much more upfront about this with Ingress, so people who know the company's history will likely guess that Pokemon Go is serving the same purpose, but for someone coming into the game without that background, there is nothing in the game itself that indicates that data is being collected for other commercial purpose.

Re: 'Pokémon Go' players unknowingly trained delivery robots with 30B images

#46

Post by KaiserPro »

Niantic are a number of people who are doing this. Its not that clear from the article, but niantic spatial are using the images captured from users to create a 3d model of "THE WORLD" or where people play pokemon go.

They have then fed that data into a more modern version of colmap (https://github.com/colmap/colmap) to create a point cloud. Then the engineering to make sure that point cloud is aligned accurately and automatically.

Once you have that point cloud aligned to the world, all you need is another image with some overlapping feature. Using simple trigonometry you can work out where the camera is from one picture

This is largely trivial to do for a few 100 sqaure meters. the hard part is doing it fast in at the city scale. Extracting a few thousand features from an image and then matching them against >billion other points is hard to do quickly, without some optimisations.

The thing that is not mentioned here is that data freshness is actually more important. Building change (advertising hoardings, paint jobs, logo changes, building remodelled etc) so the data goes stale. Its actually not that expensive anymore to just send your own people to scan areas. (A number of startups pre 2020 did it, mapillary provides a platform for it, although now owned by facebook)

The robots will be feeding that data back in to the map. the special sauce is updating the map without infringing patents, and doing it efficiently.

Re: 'Pokémon Go' players unknowingly trained delivery robots with 30B images

#47

Post by 5- »

KaiserPro wrote: post #46

Niantic are a number of people who are doing this. Its not that clear from the article, but niantic spatial are using the images captured from users to create a 3d model of "THE WORLD" or where people play pokemon go. They have then fed that data into a more modern version of colmap ( https://github.com/colmap/colmap ) to create a point cloud. Then the engineering to make sure that point cloud is aligned accurately a…

see this 2007 talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosyn...

i remember this being available in google maps in 2008 or so. fun technology!

Re: 'Pokémon Go' players unknowingly trained delivery robots with 30B images

#48

Post by pavon »

xnorswap wrote: post #9
LollipopYakuza wrote: post #6

Despite the lack of transparency, is this so bad? Players are being given a game in exchange for collectively building a database.

It's the lack of transparency that is bad. PokemonGo did not make it clear it was taking (and uploading) pictures. You could argue that "of course it must be for AR", but that isn't clear at all. The camera shows a live image before I take a photo, and I wouldn't expect a photo to be captured and sent if I didn't press the (virtual) shutter. There are probably some cheap phones that do precisely that, and I'd be just…

It isn't recording surreptitiously. The data was collected as part of an optional feature which is a very intentional process where you start a scan and then move around the object being scanned to get data from multiple angles, and then click to upload the data to Niantic. The uploading is called out specifically as a separate step (at least early on it was common for uploads to fail, so it had the option to save the scan to upload later when you had better signal). There is nothing secret about the fact that Niantic is collecting this data.

The lack of transparency is about how Niantic is using the data, selling it to third parties for purposes unrelated to the game. And I agree with the parent that this is a fair trade for a free game, especially since that part is optional, but more transparency would be better.

Re: 'Pokémon Go' players unknowingly trained delivery robots with 30B images

#49

Post by jsbisviewtiful »

ragebol wrote: post #35
Brosper wrote: post #33

I think that only the author of this post didn't know that. Everybody know that Niantic is a big data company.

Everyone in a very specific bubble

Even without looking it up to know for sure it was pretty obvious and could be inferred by anyone playing the game. Especially the scanning, which was painfully obvious to be a data collection method.

Re: 'Pokémon Go' players unknowingly trained delivery robots with 30B images

#50

Post by collingreen »

Brainspackle wrote: post #34
ses1984 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there an $80 Pokémon game where walking outside is a core mechanic and that facilitates interaction with a huge network of users?

Take a walk while you play your switch

"We've got pokemon go at home!"
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