“Over the past five years, Niantic has focused on building our Visual Positioning System, 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.”
According to Niantic, the company has developed in-depth scans of over 10 million locations worldwide, and users capture around one million new individual scans per week. The company is using these hundreds of millions of images to train “more than 50 million neural networks” which compress thousands of mapped images into digital recreations of real-world physical spaces.
“Imagine yourself standing behind a church,” the blog post continues. “The closest local model has seen only the front entrance of that church, and thus, it will not be able to tell you where you are. But on a global scale, we have seen thousands of churches captured by local models worldwide. No church is the same, but many share common characteristics. A large geospatial model accesses that distributed knowledge.”
Advertisement
What’s the use of all these scans? Niantic suggests that the tech could continue to improve augmented reality products, autonomous systems, and navigation. The app has been used in the past to learn the habits of its users and discern optimal walking paths between two locations, so this just takes things to a new level.
New York’s congestion pricing has finally gone into effect, following years of legal and political wrangling. Basically, if you insist on driving into the most densely populated part of the city, you now have to pay to do so. You can still walk or take public transportation freely, and you can still drive if you want, but driving costs extra. Not everyone is happy about this new charge, including real estate mogul Andrew Heiberger, who told something called Freedom News dot TV that he can’t believe he has to pay to drive a few blocks to see his kids. - Collin Woodard Read More
Who could have predicted that goings on at the Boring Company would be dodgy? Photo: Boring Company
Elon Musk’s Boring Company cut a 1.7-mile tunnel beneath the streets of Las Vegas that’s meant to offer a clean way of clearing up traffic in Sin City. Since it opened, the tunnel has drawn criticism for its high construction costs and relatively low passenger numbers compared with traditional mass transit systems like trains and subways. Now, the company behind it has been accused of skirting “building, environmental and labor regulations,” amid a lack of oversight on the project. - Owen Bellwood Read More
When you think of an all-terrain vehicle, what image forms in your mind? If you’re younger you might picture a quad or a four-wheeler as your default ATV, but folks who knew the market before 1988 may know something different: This odd three-wheeler with no suspension, sold by Honda, and banned from the U.S. for the sheer number of children hurt and killed by riding it. - Amber DaSilva Read More
Typically, when automakers take on ambitious construction projects, it’s something like a huge new battery facility. Five years ago, however, Toyota announced plans to build something more ambitious than a factory or even a new corporate campus — a whole-ass city. Recently, Toyota completed phase one of the place Toyota is calling the Woven City, and the first 100 residents will move in soon. - Collin Woodard Read More
The plane suffered damage to its wing after the crash. Photo: Rocco Pier Luigi via Wikimedia Commons
Idiot civilian drone operators flying flying over the Palisades wildfire crashed their attention-machine into a Super Scooper firefighting aircraft meant to fight said deadly fire. The Canadair CL-415 was struck on the nose and wing by a consumer drone Thursday, which left the plane grounded and in need of urgent repairs. - Owen Bellwood Read More
In the early hours of January 1, while partiers were busy celebrating the new year, Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove a rented Ford F-150 Lightning down New Orleans’ famous Bourbon Street, killing 14 and injuring at least 35 before dying in a shootout with police. It was a horrifying attack that stunned the nation, but as it turns out, New Orleans officials had already been made aware of the risk of vehicular attacks in the French Quarter but failed to address them due to “politics and bickering,” CNN reports. - Collin Woodard Read More
