In 2016, "Pokémon Go" was regarded as the purest gaming experience, encouraging players to stroll through their communities and meet strangers. By 2024, however, the game has quietly transformed into an astonishing training ground for geospatial artificial intelligence.
The Niantic development team recently revealed a shocking secret: for years, millions of players have been unknowingly helping to train a massive geospatial AI system while playing the game. This technology, known as the Visual Positioning System (VPS), is assisting AI in learning complex three-dimensional spatial information through players' everyday gaming behaviors.
Interestingly, this process is almost imperceptible. Just like the internet text training for ChatGPT, every action players take in the game, especially the use of the "Pokémon Playground" feature to fix virtual Pokémon locations, is unknowingly "feeding" data to the AI.
However, behind the potential applications of this technology lies unsettling possibilities. Cyber intelligence analyst Elise Thomas points out that this technology could eventually be used for military purposes.
Imagine if someone had told you in 2016 that your actions of capturing Pokémon would one day become part of the world's largest geospatial intelligence training program. What would you have thought?
This may be the eerie magic of technological development: what seems like harmless entertainment today could very well be the key to changing the world tomorrow.