Niantic plans a “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.