Niantic announces “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

I can really imagine a meeting with the big brasses of Google/Niantic a few years ago that went along

- We need to be the first to have a better, new generation 3D model of the world to build the future of maps on it. How can we get that data?"

+ What about gamifying it and crowd-sourcing it to the masses?

- Sure! Let's buy some Pokemon rights!

It's scary but some people do really have some long-term vision

Pokemon Go is built on the same engine as Inverness I think its called. When it launched they even used the same POIs. I think this was ~5-7 years before PGO launched.

Edit: I said inverness and meant ingress. Apologies.

I think you are thinking of Ingress. No idea what Inverness is.

Ingress and PGO share the same portals and stuffs and its what PGO got its data from.

They definitely had this as a long-term vision

Inverness is a city in Scotland

Also a tiny town in Marin County, CA and one of my favorite words. It’s just so nice to say. Inverness.

Pokemon Go was launched on the Unity game engine in 2016. Ingress was using a different game engine at the time, and wasn't rewritten into Unity until several years later. Even the backend/server side was significantly different, with them needing to write a shim to ensure compatibility during & after the move to Unity.

Surely the game engine has little to do with logged telemetry data. No?

Perhaps, perhaps not - I have my theories, but is that not what you meant when you said Pokemon Go was built on the same engine as Ingress?

I do think it wasn't until after Pokemon Go launched and they saw the success of it, that they shifted focus to be more of a platform for these types of experiences (see Niantic Lightship). Additionally, I think Unity offered them the opportunity to integrate with ARCore and collect much more detailed data than they would've ever been able to do on the old Ingress engine. In fact, I expect a significant chunk of ARCore functionality was added specifically thanks to Niantic and Unity (in fact, you see Unity mentioned all over the Google Developer docs for it).

I did say engine, you’re correct.

I imagine the logs aren’t tied to the engine, which I suppose is the point I should have made without researching which engine the games used as opposed to which company made both games.

Famously for a long time, the best way to get a point of interest into PGO was to play ingress and request it's addition there