Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones

Pokémon Go was released at the beginning of July 2016. A week later, the Air Force kicked off its Red Flag exercise in Nellis AFB outside of Vegas. For the several thousand active duty folks participating, this is a month-long TDY from their normal base to Vegas. The premise is a large-scale war simulation, and it encompasses essentially all major wartime functions. I was directly involved in supporting drone operations (including live strikes) during this exercise.

The thing that’s funny about your comment is that because Pokémon go was just launched a week prior, a huge percentage of the participants were playing it in their downtime between exercises. You have to understand: these are thousands of 20/30-somethings (and occasionally even teenagers), meeting back up with friends from all over the world in Vegas. On and off base, people are socializing, having fun, and playing games. While phones were limited to outside of SCIFs, most of the base had no such restrictions. I recall wandering around base at 2am with friends playing it.

What’s funny is the same was happening with our deployed friends as well at the same time. This was a game that all their friends back home were playing, and when deployed, you need all the morale you can get. There were technically OPSEC policies this all probably violated but this was before any blowback from Strava accidentally revealing military bases or other similar incidents, so there was no specific guidance or moratorium on it.

All this to say, I understand what you’re trying to arrive at via deduction, but I think your understanding of the world in this case may be a bit too limited to meaningfully speak to this. That said, is the headline sensationalist? Probably.

If you’ve played the game, the scanning function is only for what they call Pokestops: These are points of interest that you can walk to and get items in the game. The game gives you points if you walk in a circle around one and take a short video.

They’re relatively sparse. At most, they captured some 3D models of some things like signs, small landmarks (up close) and the fronts of some buildings.

The images captured by something like Google Maps are a million times more useful for someone trying to construct a world model with a lot of coverage. The Pokémon Go captures would be useful if you wanted something like a detailed 3D scan of the sign in front the student building or something.

Currently active theaters. And now there are detailed locations of our cities. We might not get killbots today but we will get pacificationbots.

But presumably the images/models at ground level can be used to train/improve the general performance of Vantor's aerial (satelite based) navigation system so it works better elsewhere?

Is Pokémon Go not played in the Middle East, India, Taiwan, Korea or Japan?

Also Vantar: "The superpower of generative AI is that data in one task generalizes to other tasks!"

There's even a Pokemon exclusive to the middle east region: sandstorm pattern Vivillion. Lots of players there.

are you saying that drone training in quiet residential neighborhoods is not training? are you saying self driving cars can only drive in theaters where they've been trained, because autonomous training is always specific by neighborhood? are you saying that if a particular region has some novel terrain that all previous training must be discarded?

For now.

If you train a soldier in the US, is he unable to do those things outside the US?

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 overlapping, the gap and the solution.

rapid 3d modeling of topography and cityscapes + supplementation with other data, e.g. pokemon. But ultimately that's supplementation, not the main effort.

That could change in an instant.

MapComplete is a nice alternative if you care about some part of the map that are not easily filterable by StreetComplethttps://mapcomplete.org/

Legislation establishing consumer ownership over their data and requiring consent for novel uses seems like the obvious, existing, movement to join

See:

- [Electronic Privacy Information Center](https://epic.org/) which is doing a lot of work to keep the CFPB in check to require explicit user consent for monetizing transactions

- [Electronic Frontier Foundation](https://www.eff.org/) which fights back against flawed legislation and has generally been uncompromising in their advocacy for an Opt-In Consent standard

- [Center for Democracy and Technology](https://cdt.org/) which is focused on countering algorithmic exploitation and advocating strict rules around "automated decision making tech" like opt-out rights before an AI uses their data to make decisions about their housing, credit, or employment

That was the initial objective, improving navigation by having people walk slowly on pedestrian accessible locations instead of only the main roads. But once that data is collated, it could go anywhere and you've signed any rights to what happens with it away when you agreed to the Ts & Cs.

I guess this also explains how they were paying for the free 3d model photogrammetry processing that app does.

Also in that worldview, we have the responsibility to defend innocent children. Let's if they can follow their own moral code and outlaw this surveillance to protect our kids.

It should also be pointed out that Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church have been understood to have been cat's paws for Russia's notorious KGB successor agencies for a very long time now.

Or maybe sometimes censorship actually DOES protect its citizens?

The story here however I'm not too sure about: Isn't the game mostly played in dense urban areas? - by the time you need military drones there the area will have changed a lot (destruction, fortification, ... and overall be outdated) where I think the civilian drones (delivery, cars, ....) benefit more. While the technology certainly is dual use.

There is no 'we'. 99%+ of people view the world as a zero sum game where for me to win, somebody has to lose and if I don't do whatever it takes, somebody else will and then I lose, therefore I have no morals or principles or virtues and anyone who does is a liar or a fool.

Everything is a bad faith act, everyone is a selfish bad faith actor and I shouldn't feel bad about being one because everyone else who isn't a fool is too.

This tragically wrong but intuitively correct worldview and much more was explained by Plato long, long ago and just about no one understood any of it. At least the text survived and people with 140+ IQ and an iota of decency can read it and be at peace knowing they're not crazy or foolish.

But I do appreciate alot about what they are doing and choose to do

Reminds me more of a theme park. Yes, a heavy handed corporation runs it and if you have any dissent it won’t go well, but if you don’t choose to focus on that then it will be a joyous place and you have the opportunity to contribute to that energy and be rewarded by something that simulates a free market

Shops come and go, churches do not move, schools tend not to move much, industry areas is somewhat dynamic, military installations might be static or dynamic, trees grow or are removed.

The geographical data already exists in digital maps. And I would expect competent militaries already have maps of enemy territory. It's the second part that was so far missing.

This combined set allows the training of AI models that can say, "When my surroundings look like x, that looks like y on a map".

So when your drone's GPS gets jammed, it can look at its surroundings, reference its (internal and offline) maps, figure out where it is, and navigate.

Have you ever seen a commercial use of anything like this? That should give you a hint about how reliable these systems get.

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

... Except, well, when it's the doing of this same, so called "defence" industry.

But that's not what happened. The data came from very explicit scanning tasks centered about pokestops, not the AR pokemon capture. I used it once or twice to test it out, and it was a drawn out process where it asks you to slowly orbit the pokestop while filming, then permission to upload the (huge) files. You even had to activate a special "volunteer" account flag to even see these tasks.

From TFA:

> Since 2021, Pokémon Go has asked players to record short videos of real-world locations, called Pokéstops, to earn extra in-game items. Scanning all the buildings, streets, and trees in a 360-degree sweep was optional, and Niantic asked separately for permission to keep the footage. Granting it meant agreeing to extra terms.

I'm sure they used GPS data from the players too, but I still hold that it's unlikely the AR pokemon capture yielded any data to them.

Every. Single. Time.

Same mentality.

This is not at all an honest way of saying "Niantics founder raised money from In-Q-Tel"

Pokémon Go can be pretty expensive with micro-transactions.