Posted by vrganj 13 hours ago
Enter AI, a new era of soulless wonder.
Intelligentia Artificiosa.
Ingenium Artificum.
— Dreams of Silicon and Sorrow
Spyware company spawns a new spyware company.
In the latest season they've gotten rid of the scan rewards, so I guess they got all the data they needed.
I am conflicted on this report.
1) VPS is not new, the startup I worked at had a working public system in 2018.
2) The hard part about VPSs is not actually the navigation, its generating and querying the map.
How does the VPS work?
You build a point cloud of features (for us we paid people to go and record videos in cities, Tesla/Waymo/toyata/google drove cars niantic got it's players to take videos/pictures)
Align that point cloud to the 3d world, store it in a way that can be queried quickly (doing that quickly and at scale is still an area of research)
Then your client needs to extract the keypoints from an image and perform triangulation against the map to see where the camera was taken (There are calibration issues, but we ain't got time for that)
Now.
Niantic, from what I can see (and its been a while) has a database of key landmarks, but not of the areas inbetween. For decent navigation I would say that this is a massive problem.
I know niantic are pushing the whole "spatial world model" but frankly I don't think that scales. They stuff they have released is memorybound in vGPUs which isn't that useful for realtime querying.
I strongly suspect that actually they have a different system, much more traditional along the lines of colmap, or hloc, or something with a feedforward model in it.
However for the drone usercase, what you actually want is SLAM, which is a very different problem. for SLAM you need to build the map whilst your are moving, and then try and do loop closure or some other method to stop drift. Once you've gone there and back you can use that model for relocaliosation.
That gets you good navigation around landmarks, but when you go further away, you get less usable feature points, as they are closer together you get more position error/need higher resolution cameras.
The intermediate places gives you the precise consistent navigation.
and we even have youtube videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiJOHV9rIxU
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
This is about players all over the world contributing scans of their own countries to US military, though.
The principle is already turning up on the other side of the front, where a downed Russian drone was found matching live camera feeds against preloaded terrain imagery rather than trusting a single GPS module.
https://dronexl.co/2025/06/10/russian-ai-drone-nvidia-sony-u...
Is the geographical data more useful, or are buildings and other structures more important?
Genuinely don't know much in this space.
You also need a day/night dataset (although some newer descriptors are day/night resistant)
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.
Have you ever seen a commercial use of anything like this? That should give you a hint about how reliable these systems get.
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.
Niantic has the benefit that they can steer "volunteers" to specific points, though.
... Except, well, when it's the doing of this same, so called "defence" industry.
every time I see any startup run "games" on some aspect of daily life, it's going to go into killer robots in the end.