Pokémon Go players unwittingly contributed to tech with military drone uses - Ars Technica
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A decade after the global craze for Pokémon Go peaked, an AI company has been using billions of real-world images captured by millions of players to develop navigation technologies for delivery robots and possibly military drones. That represents an intriguing but potentially discomfiting legacy for an augmented reality mobile game that has incentivized gamers to capture short smartphone videos of physical neighborhoods and landmarks.
The AI company, Niantic Spatial, was spun out of Pokémon Go game developer Niantic in May 2025, after Niantic separately sold its licensed games such as Pokémon Go to the Saudi-backed video game publisher Scopely. But before that deal, Niantic publicly announced plans to use scans from millions of Pokémon Go players along with data captured by users of the company’s Scaniverse app to train and develop a “large geospatial model”—a 3D model of the physical world trained on the geolocated images provided by app users scanning real-world locations.
“Ground scans were one component to help train Niantic Spatial’s real-world foundation models —AI systems that learn to recognize and interpret physical spaces,” a Niantic Spatial spokesperson told Ars. “The models are the product of that training, not a copy of or a means of accessing the underlying scans, which were of public points of interest such as statues and fountains.”
After Niantic Spatial spun out as a standalone company, it trained its model on 30 billion images mostly clustered around urban environment locations that game players were incentivized to visit, according to MIT Technology Review. The images often captured the same location from many different angles under different lighting and weather conditions, and came with valuable metadata showing the location and orientation of user phones when they were capturing such images.
Such ground scans “were an entirely optional feature in games, where users created a short video of a public location,” the Niantic Spatial spokesperson said. “We’ve been transparent about the fact that the scans would improve our technology platform since 2019 in our privacy policy and public announcements.”
That allowed Niantic Spatial to develop its own visual positioning system—a type of technology that can provide a device’s position and orientation by comparing visual data from cameras with reference data from detailed 3D maps of environments. Such a system can be especially helpful indoors, in city environments where GPS and other global navigation satellite systems’ signals are unreliable, or in regions where there is active GPS jamming.
MIT Technology Review highlighted Niantic Spatial’s technology in March 2026, when the company announced a new partnership with Coco Robotics. The robotics company aimed to use Niantic Spatial’s AI model and visual positioning system to help its fleet of four-wheeled delivery robots navigate city streets.
But in December 2025, Niantic Spatial had also announced a deal with the spatial intelligence company Vantor to develop a positioning system that could help both flying drones and ground vehicles navigate GPS-denied environments. Vantor, formerly known as the space and satellite company Maxar Intelligence, has multiple US government contracts with the National Geospace-Intelligence Agency, various branches of the US military, and the Department of Homeland Security.
The new military-industrial complex
The “comprehensive positioning system” aimed to integrate Niantic Spatial’s visual positioning system with Vantor’s 3D terrain data and Raptor software. During the Defence Geospatial Intelligence (DGI) conference held in London in February 2026, Tory Smith, director of product management at Niantic Spatial, described early testing of the integrated system as leading to a 70 percent reduction in positioning error with accuracy to within 1.5 meters in many scenarios.
The partnership between Niantic Spatial and Vantor received more public attention through a recent story by Trouw, a Dutch news publication. “Without the large number of scans from all those gamers, the development of this system would never have progressed so...