‘Pokémon Go’ players unknowingly trained delivery robots with 30 billion images
15 April 2026 Nearly a decade ago, Pokémon Go turned the real world into a digital scavenger hunt, with virtual creatures hiding in plain sight. The early augmented reality smartphone app prompted hundreds of millions of players to wander into parks, parking lots, and even dimly lit alleyways, peering through their phone cameras in search of Pikachus and Charizards that the app superimposed onto their surroundings. It was a major hit. But 10 years on from the app’s peak, it turns out that digital creature catching may now help that piping hot pizza you ordered find you…
all that time users spent wandering around playing Pokémon Go will now help determine how well a courier robot can deliver your take out. It’s a stark example of how crowdsourced data, seemingly collected for one purpose, can be quietly repurposed years later for something quite different…
Instead of helping users navigate the way that GPS does, VPS determines where someone is based on their surroundings. That makes Pokémon Go particularly useful as a data source, because players had to physically travel to specific locations and point their phones at various angles…
Whether players knew it or not, those scans were creating 3D models of the real world that would eventually power the Niantic Spatial model.
