I like Pokemon Go and play almost every day. I did this scan one time and then stopped. The rewards are not worth the hassle. I don't think many players are doing it. It's just very weird to stand somewhere and scan an object.

I also wouldn't say 'unknowingly trained', it's pretty obvious what it does, and I think the game even tells you that they want to understands how the POI looks like in 3D.

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mikae1 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I don't think many players are doing it.

Do we have to think? Apparently they amassed 30B images. :)

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momoschili 3 hours ago | parent [-]

30B images isn't that much in the context of Pokemon Go playerbase of ~50 million (conservative estimate based on users today). That's about 600 images per person, in a game that has been out since 2016... that's pretty low adoption as the previous user said. I don't think the quest has been out since 2016, but considering a large fraction of users are basically daily users, it's still quite a small number of images.

	▲	skeledrew 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That 30B could just be the useful set after cleanup.

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organsnyder 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My son showed me how he does these quests: he points the phone at the floor and just wiggles it back and forth.

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abroszka33 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Haha :D Good tip, I will try that too.

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deadbabe 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Your son is a bad data point.

	▲	organsnyder 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Aww... shucks. I'm such a proud father.
	▲	Supermancho 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Bad for some goals, good for others.

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FrustratedMonky 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

exactly. that is why i doubt they will get actual navigable information out of it.

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pohl 4 hours ago | parent [-]

To maintain that take, wouldn't you need to offer a plausible way that Niantic managed to train their Visual Positioning System using that data if the data was all bad?

	▲	FrustratedMonky 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I guess we don't know the terms of the deal, as far as how much they paid? So maybe they didn't pay much, so whatever data they could extract was ok for the cost. The other point from article. I took this as experimental, so maybe we'll find out later that they really couldn't get much usable data.

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Larrikin 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I used to just record the ground and even leave out my feet, but apparently they detect and ban people who do this too often now. The data was always going somewhere shady, but after the sale it is even worse so I just stopped completely. At best you get a poffin or rare candy and that absolutely is not worth it.

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ohyoutravel 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Same, I do it once in a great while. Give me a rare candy or rare candy XL per scan and you’ll find me jumping all over the neighborhood!