Food delivery robots are struggling to steer clear of Chicago’s bus stop shelters. Within just 48 hours, two autonomous couriers from different companies veered off course and collided with shelters shattering glass and alarming nearby residents. These pair of dramatic incidents come amidst brewing tension among community members and lawmakers in Chicago who oppose the robots’ presence. The crashes also come just weeks after one of the manufacturers announced it was integrating a new mapping system trained on “Pokémon Go” data which is designed to improve navigation accuracy.
Niantic. And always have been
I’m surprised how many people didn’t realise this. I used to play Ingress, which was also from Niantic and similar to Pokémon Go but involved agents and hacking POIs rather than Pokémon trainers and Poké Stops.
Niantic discussed at the time that this was to support their work on the N+1 navigation problem, although I can’t for the life of me find a quoatable reference for this. I played Ingress knowing that my location data was being harvested thinking it was to solve a problem.
I also wonder how many people realise Niantic Labs was started as a Google internal startup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niantic%2C_Inc.
I joined Ingress during the closed beta, and technically still play, incredibly rarely. Before they started monetizing it with boosts and extra item storage and stuff, it was a really cool, unique game. Meet up with other players of both factions and either blanket the town and spend a couple hours hacking every portal high enough level to give good gear, or battle live for control of real locations. I once fought off a couple by myself, the three of us frantically running around a playground/park for like 90 minutes. Good fun, good exercise too.
When PGO was released, and the swarm of new players to effectively the same game (same backend, same locations, just a different visual and Pokémon instead of Portals and Lore) lots of places got bitchy about people coming around and not buying stuff, getting very Karen about the situation. Pair that with the desire to cash in on both games, and then tightening the requirements and restrictions for android (for a long time, I couldn’t play because I was running GrapheneOS).
I still fire it up when I think about it and have some time, but I haven’t been to a meet-up in over a decade, even longer for an official event. I’m still level 8, so I can interact with all items afaik, but my stats are basically a time capsule of a time forgotten.
That’s kind of the point of those AR games. It’s been obvious from the beginning.
This is a surprise to no one, assuming you have been paying attention.