Article by Josh Taylor: “An AI model trained on data collected from users of Pokémon Go will potentially help military drones find their location in war zones.
Pokémon Go, a 2016 augmented reality mobile game, allowed players to find and catch Pokémon in the real world using the cameras on their mobile phones, and exploded in popularity. In 2018, the company reported having more than 800m downloads worldwide.
A 2021 update to the game introduced Pokéstops, which gave players in-game rewards for scanning real locations using their devices. It required users to opt in and upload the recording.
Niantic, which created Pokémon in partnership with Nintendo, collected users’ location scan data before the company sold its gaming division in 2025.
The historical scans were used to train the company’s AI models to recognise and interpret spaces in the physical world, as first reported by DroneXL this week…(More)”.
