My friend plays Pokémon Go for hours every day while walking his dog. I asked him about this and now we’re both confused. The in game scanning is only for major landmarks in the game. Even in his dense city these landmarks are few and far between. The world model would only have sparse information in the area immediately surrounding these landmarks.

I don’t know if there’s much substance to the delivery robot story. This could be a journalist trying to make the story relatable.

I was thinking the 'scan a pokestop' data would be very patchy but I guess they also have images from people catching pokemon in AR mode?