video games

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Niantic uses Pokémon Go player data to build AI navigation system

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Last week, Niantic announced plans to create an AI model for navigating the physical world using scans collected from players of its mobile games, such as Pokémon Go, and from users of its Scaniverse app, reports 404 Media.

All AI models require training data. So far, companies have collected data from websites, YouTube videos, books, audio sources, and more, but this is perhaps the first we’ve heard of AI training data collected through a mobile gaming app.

“Over the past five years, Niantic has focused on building our Visual Positioning System (VPS), which uses a single image from a phone to determine its position and orientation using a 3D map built from people scanning interesting locations in our games and Scaniverse,” Niantic wrote in a company blog post.

The company calls its creation a “large geospatial model” (LGM), drawing parallels to large language models (LLMs) like the kind that power ChatGPT. Whereas language models process text, Niantic’s model will process physical spaces using geolocated images collected through its apps.

The scale of Niantic’s data collection reveals the company’s sizable presence in the AR space. The model draws from over 10 million scanned locations worldwide, with users capturing roughly 1 million new scans weekly through Pokémon Go and Scaniverse. These scans come from a pedestrian perspective, capturing areas inaccessible to cars and street-view cameras.

First-person scans

The company reports it has trained more than 50 million neural networks, each representing a specific location or viewing angle. These networks compress thousands of mapping images into digital representations of physical spaces. Together, they contain over 150 trillion parameters—adjustable values that help the networks recognize and understand locations. Multiple networks can contribute to mapping a single location, and Niantic plans to combine its knowledge into one comprehensive model that can understand any location, even from unfamiliar angles.

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Nintendo’s new clock tracks your movement in bed

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The motion detectors reportedly work with various bed sizes, from twin to king. As users shift position, the clock’s display responds by moving on-screen characters from left to right and playing sound effects from Nintendo video games based on different selectable themes.

A photo of Nintendo Sound Clock Alarmo.

A photo of Nintendo Sound Clock Alarmo.

A photo of Nintendo Sound Clock Alarmo. Credit: Nintendo

The Verge’s Chris Welch examined the new device at Nintendo’s New York City store shortly after its announcement, noting that setting up Alarmo involves a lengthy process of configuring its motion-detection features. The setup cannot be skipped and might prove challenging for younger users. The clock prompts users to input the date, time, and bed-related information to calibrate its sensors properly. Even so, Welch described “small, thoughtful Nintendo touches throughout the experience.”

Themes and sounds

Beyond motion tracking, the clock has a few other tricks up its sleeve. Its screen brightness adjusts automatically based on ambient light levels, and users can control Alarmo through buttons on top, including a large dial for navigation and selection.

The device’s full-color rectangular display shows the time and 35 different scenes that feature animated Nintendo characters from games like the aforementioned Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Splatoon 3, as well as Pikmin 4 and Ring Fit Adventure.

A promotional image for a Super Mario Odyssey theme for the Nintendo Sound Clock Alarmo. Nintendo

Alarmo also offers sleep sounds to help users doze off. Nintendo plans to release additional downloadable sounds and themes for the device in the future using its built-in Wi-Fi capabilities, which are accessible after linking a Nintendo account. The Nintendo website mentions upcoming themes for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Animal Crossing: New Horizons in particular.

As of today, Nintendo Online members can order an Alarmo online, and as mentioned above, Nintendo says the clock will be available through other retailers in January 2025.

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Largely cut off from Western games, Russia looks into a homegrown game console

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The new digital iron curtain —

How hard could it be?

–

A Cold War-era arcade cabinet that serves as an example of what happened the last time Russia was forced to create a home-grown video game market.

Enlarge / A Cold War-era arcade cabinet that serves as an example of what happened the last time Russia was forced to create a home-grown video game market.

It’s been over two years since major players in the international game industry united to largely cut off the Russian market in response to a request from a beleaguered Ukraine. The relative isolation has apparently forced Vladimir Putin’s government to contemplate the kind of homegrown gaming hardware and software that characterized Cold War gaming behind the Iron Curtain.

PC Gamer brings word of a series of recently approved Russian economic orders from the Kremlin. Amid talk of airport and museum funding, ocean shipping, and road construction is the somewhat bewildering instruction for the government to (machine translation):

consider the issue of organizing the production of stationary and portable game consoles and game consoles, as well as the creation of an operating system and a cloud system for delivering games and programs to users

Oh, is that all?

A massive undertaking

Gaming technology isn’t a completely new area of focus for the Russian government. In 2022, the Ministry of Digital Development reportedly started discussing the possibility of creating a homegrown domestic Russian game engine. But building an entire gaming platform from scratch would be an even bigger undertaking.

To be fair, building your own game console today is a bit easier than it would have been in a different era. Open source platforms like Android can provide a good starting point for a bespoke gaming operating system (it worked for Ouya, kind of), while off-the-shelf, system-on-a-chip solutions can save a lot of the hardware engineering work needed to develop a new console.

But even if those issues get “solved,” the Russian government would still have to build the other scaffolding that supports a robust gaming platform. Crafting features like payment processing, game downloads, online play, moderation, quality control, and more is not a simple undertaking, even for major conglomerates like Microsoft or Valve. And that’s before you get into attracting the developers that would need to create the actual games for this new platform.

Building a bare-bones Steam Deck competitor isn't nearly as hard as building out the platform that supports that hardware.

Enlarge / Building a bare-bones Steam Deck competitor isn’t nearly as hard as building out the platform that supports that hardware.

Valve

Speaking to Russian-language newspaper Kommersant, Anton Fomin, the head of retail projects for mobile phone company Fplus, said, “In Russia, no one has the expertise that would allow them to produce their own PlayStation or Xbox-level console” (according to a machine translation). An unnamed expert source also told Kommersant that creating a full system would take Russia 5 to 10 years and 5 to 10 billion rubles ($54 to $108 million) just to get a gaming platform that would “lag behind already existing foreign solutions in terms of parameters by 10 to 15 years.”

The fact that Russia is even contemplating this kind of move might reflect the wider state of the country’s gaming sector. A 2023 survey found a significant majority of Russian gamers resorting to piracy for their gaming fix as legitimate access to foreign games dwindled. Russian job listing data from last year also suggests that Russia’s domestic game development has withered by up to 40 percent since the start of the Ukraine war.

But this isn’t the first time Russia has been forced to bootstrap its own homegrown gaming industry. In the waning days of the Cold War, Soviet engineers cut off from the Western gaming market created a variety of odd knock-off arcade machines and hundreds of amateur computer games, including many with surprisingly activist themes. If that era of Russian gaming could create something like Tetris, maybe the idea of a new Russian gaming platform isn’t completely ridiculous.

The Russian government has until June 15 to make its recommendations about the feasibility of any domestic game console creation plans.

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