Pokémon Go was released at the beginning of July 2016. A week later, the Air Force kicked off its Red Flag exercise in Nellis AFB outside of Vegas. For the several thousand active duty folks participating, this is a month-long TDY from their normal base to Vegas. The premise is a large-scale war simulation, and it encompasses essentially all major wartime functions. I was directly involved in supporting drone operations (including live strikes) during this exercise.
The thing that’s funny about your comment is that because Pokémon go was just launched a week prior, a huge percentage of the participants were playing it in their downtime between exercises. You have to understand: these are thousands of 20/30-somethings (and occasionally even teenagers), meeting back up with friends from all over the world in Vegas. On and off base, people are socializing, having fun, and playing games. While phones were limited to outside of SCIFs, most of the base had no such restrictions. I recall wandering around base at 2am with friends playing it.
What’s funny is the same was happening with our deployed friends as well at the same time. This was a game that all their friends back home were playing, and when deployed, you need all the morale you can get. There were technically OPSEC policies this all probably violated but this was before any blowback from Strava accidentally revealing military bases or other similar incidents, so there was no specific guidance or moratorium on it.
All this to say, I understand what you’re trying to arrive at via deduction, but I think your understanding of the world in this case may be a bit too limited to meaningfully speak to this. That said, is the headline sensationalist? Probably.
AFB = air force base
TDY = temporary duty
SCIF = sensitive compartmented information facility
OPSEC = operational security
In the military it’s basically whenever they send you off on training or even deployment can be considered a type of TDY. Usually they’re pretty competitive to get selected for, as it’s a huge break from daily monotony, and often comes with some relatively significant financial incentive (hazard pay, tax free income, per diem, relocation $).
If you’ve played the game, the scanning function is only for what they call Pokestops: These are points of interest that you can walk to and get items in the game. The game gives you points if you walk in a circle around one and take a short video.
They’re relatively sparse. At most, they captured some 3D models of some things like signs, small landmarks (up close) and the fronts of some buildings.
The images captured by something like Google Maps are a million times more useful for someone trying to construct a world model with a lot of coverage. The Pokémon Go captures would be useful if you wanted something like a detailed 3D scan of the sign in front the student building or something.
If this is happening it would be easy to detect by the upload bandwidth spiking during AR mode.
The 3D scan mode is a specific feature you have to use in the app that uploads 100s of megabytes afterward. It advises you to go on WiFi to do it.
If the AR mode was secretly uploading images that would be a scandal in itself.
I feel like users and readers instinctively know these limitations. We work with digital maps all the time that are out-of-date. Google and Apple don't and can't know any and all road closure and vehicle accidents in real time. Your car's radar road mapping service is as up-to-date as anything, but you still may be the first person to ever encounter a sinkhole or pothole that just appeared and it won't be on the map until you discover it. Satellite data is even more out of date because it can't be as frequently updated. There aren't anywhere near as many sensors in orbit or aerially as there are on the ground.
I haven't played PoGo in a while, but Niantic used to have human moderators and also tried to crowd-source some quality control on these world models because they knew 99% of the scans they received were bunk, either of nothing, the wrong thing, the right thing but in the dark or from an obstructed angle. I have no idea how good a job they ever did of cleaning that up, but it's a difficult task and it's never done because the world is always changing. There's only so much you can do here. Technology isn't magic.
Currently active theaters. And now there are detailed locations of our cities. We might not get killbots today but we will get pacificationbots.
If GP has access to this dataset it would be interesting to know how sparse is the data in that area.
What time you have in mind, that was really better?
(I believe the 90s were at least way more optimistic)
Don't think there's ever been a time in human history that would qualify as good, but I will take better: any time pre-COVID. We have completely gone off the rails since the pandemic.
I don't really feel like elaborating.
You can connect any two things into a sentence regardless of the state of the world. This is way off of where the problems actually are.
Edit: Some people have downvoted this without giving a reason, but I'm going to double down. Any time you have disasters or large crimes, you can connect them to children and children's things. Thinking there's anything to learn about the specific fact that you can make that connection is a mistake. It's letting the real problem spill over in a way that misleads your common sense. It's an inherent part of bad things happening that they also affect children. No matter what state the world is in.
This time you have an actual connection, the state of the world notwithstanding. If you factor in the world however, with this many wars, I'd say it's pretty much linked, regardless of the way you assembled words to make it look like it doesn't, and doubling down doesn't make it less distant from reality.
The Pokémon Go data is for small little islands around their points of interest (pokestops).
It’s not a detailed city map. The data is extremely sparse and only covers little tiny bubble around their sparse in game POIs.
The way it was represented as some sort of high resolution city map or world model was quite ridiculous.
That's not the impression I get from the TV ads.
The ads they run show people walking along sidewalks and through forested paths and through parks in AR mode.
Visual navigation is prone to degradation. Keeping the "map" updated requires constant visits. (I know because my team worked on the patent for a method for updating said maps.)
Also Pacification bot would be run by the military who most lilkey have GPS.
Finally, For ground based bots, SLAM is actually more useful, rather than pre-built map based navigation.
Ground drones however are targeted by the FPV drones (wired or radio controlled), so the new thing is to have a thing with automatic targeting to shoot those. Then again, I at least heard about using something open-cv (yes, some of those run actual linux) shaped on the FPV drone itself, as it really helps with the amount of jamming going on.
“We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” says Kokhanovskyy. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.”
Civilians dying in an armed conflict doesn't cut the definition of warcrime by itself. Deliberate targeting and intentional destruction of civil infrastructure that supports life or something like it is.
Then of course there is stuff that ICC isn't getting busy about which is clearly above the threshold -- the regular drone safaris in and around Kherson (city with pre-war population circa quarter million people) happening for the last few years.
Everything! Everything! Like all the deer, all the rabbits, all the decoys! Obviously we trust Kokhanovskyy
How likely is your opinion to change in the light of the information that, according to the article, it's Ukraine who uses these drones?
The ICC judges have less real-world power than a Pop Idol judge.
The ICC only works if every nation plays by the rules. Fewer and fewer do these days.
> “We tried it,” says drone-maker[…]. “It’s a test. We never implemented it [more widely].”
That has already existed for decades.
Pessimistically, maybe democracy's days are numbered
that was in the cards in the early 2000s when the Patriot Act got passed, mate.
now they just have the muscle (drones) to back it up.
welcome to the cyberpunk dystopia
There are clear parallels in the modern world of societies when the ruling machinery doesn't need those things from their population - petrostates. The people in these states tend to be viewed as subjects, not citizens. That's where we are headed
A corporate council of emperor kings with armies of pacification bots. The tiny sliver of window we have to ensure this doesn't happen is rapidly closing and there seems to be no movement toward ensuring that this doesn't culminate with the entire power of this new revolution in the hands of a small class of near demigods.
i think killbots are absolutely a possibility, and very soon.
rightwing pundits and meme makers are already unironically quoting Zechariah 13:8
But presumably the images/models at ground level can be used to train/improve the general performance of Vantor's aerial (satelite based) navigation system so it works better elsewhere?
It almost 1-1 data correlation, n-phone Pokémon go scans of a location helping a drone locate itself in the same location in correlation with Maxar’s satellite data.
There maybe some hyper corner case uses. Maybe the billion scans in New York City help them generalize across different phone lenses characteristics, but phone and drone lenses are so different.
Would love to hear some specifics if I’m wrong here.
there was a startup that pitched the idea of using Satellite data to do ground based navigation. (https://sturfee.com/vps) they didn't get bought out by either google, niantic or facebook, so it can't of worked that well.
Niantic's stuff is a pre-built map that the client will reference to get a position. Its essentially a massive feature matching exercise. The problem with using airborn photos is that you miss a bunch of features you can't see. (samy thing trying to match ground features from the air.)
THe lens calibration issue isn't actually that much of a problem _for the client_. if you have a rough idea of the lens (exif data really helps there) then you can still get meter accurate (and a few degrees heading) its a bit more of a problem for generating the initial map, but Structure from motion with good motion priors goes a long way to make it less of a problem
Now, Niantic are proposing that you can train a model that can relocalize generally without a detailed map, I think thats a bit far fetch, especially to do at any large scale. (ie bigger than a cubic kilometer)
The headline, which I do understand is in question, talks about training, not using the scans as a database. It is likely that you are right that the scans are not being used to provide localization data, but that is also not what the headline is pointing to.
The headline specifically speaks to using the scans for training. While I do not have any inside baseball, the problem space is often solved using neural nets and other machine learning algorithms. On the surface it seems likely that they would benefit from training data that doesn't necessarily need to be from where the conflict is actually taking place. A base world model, for example, can be developed from data collected anywhere in the world. Its is not an entirely different universe when you step into another country.
But you are suggesting that the algorithms used are entirely classical (i.e. no AI/ML)?
"get data for drone warfare" ...in 2021 (before the russian invasion...)
but did we even EXPECT drone warfare to influence the war THIS MUCH back then?
well not me -- I actually thought russia would beat the crap out of ukraine within a month (even after the failed spetsnaz attack on zelensky)
the article's assumptions only makes sense IF some people had time machines, or if CIA has some know-everything future prophet
(not to mention: drones need TOP TO BOTTOM view, not bottom-to-top view)
anyway, my verdict: sensational yellow journal article, nothing more/less
but... drones? that's just yellow journalism optimized for SEO keyword (and anyone who clicks an article with 'drone')
Is Pokémon Go not played in the Middle East, India, Taiwan, Korea or Japan?
The only place I can imagine is maybe Ukrainian drones in Russia. Still, not a tonne of data there to be useful (as compared to say Tokyo or New York).
All of them but Japan?
MEA has stuff going on beyond Iran, Lebanon or whatever country the US decides to invade this week. India has two nuclear neighbours with border disputes and weekly scuffles, sometimes a downed jet fighter or two. Taiwan is probably the biggest geopolitical tension/war/invasion possibility of our time. Korea is in a stalemate unfinished war for decades. Japan has its own very real dispute scenarios with China.
I know drone scans from Pokemon Go probably won't help in the Himalayas or South China Sea, but those regions are far from trouble free
Works less well if you want to use structures for radar cover.
ofc going by the entire surface of the earth its not a lot of places, but i would never call such a thing statistically insignificant..
There's even a Pokemon exclusive to the middle east region: sandstorm pattern Vivillion. Lots of players there.
Maxar is/was primarily a satellite data company, and to say Pokemon data would add any major value in any of today's active drone deployments with the level of Satellite coverage Maxar already has is a wide stretch.
Moreover, ground forces in the area would need pretty heavy jamming tech in place too for this kind of data to be useful. It's a sliver of a sliver of a sliver situation.
According to Wikipedia, more than half of the Middle East countries are either belligerents or were otherwise attacked in the ongoing war.
But what I mean is that there are enough players there to be significant part of the ecosystem. The war made obtaining those Vivillion harder.
I am a daily player, I have scanned something once, the rewards were minuscule, I never did it again. I have that specific vivillon which was hard to get because not many players were from the relevant area even before the current events, and I just can't see how the war is related to any of this.
For now.
rapid 3d modeling of topography and cityscapes + supplementation with other data, e.g. pokemon. But ultimately that's supplementation, not the main effort.
That could change in an instant.
Also Vantar: "The superpower of generative AI is that data in one task generalizes to other tasks!"
If you train a soldier in the US, is he unable to do those things outside the US?
Can you elaborate?
GPS can be faulty in cities.
Pokémon Go scans, are primarily in cities.
The mapping in the article, is specifically saying to use visual cues when GPS is faulty.
How is this not directly 1-1 overlapping, the gap and the solution.
However that data has a half life and needs to be refreshed.
For flying drones, ground level data is really not that useful. mainly because you can't see it, because its obscured by trees, building and clouds.
But, this is not a new thing. Google, Apple, facebook and niantic all have VPSs as do a bunch of other startups.
For Drones you will probably need SLAM to capture the map, and then once you have the initial map, you can keep it updated.
You can experiment at home using https://github.com/colmap
Like you see in drone races. But with a little bomb attached.
Even with half life. That could be years. Depending on changes. Old neighborhoods probably haven't changed.. And, not sure I read that deal had a cutoff, or not. Could they continue getting updates. ?
The issue you have there is you need a high shutter speed with no rolling shutter to get good reading.
are you saying that drone training in quiet residential neighborhoods is not training? are you saying self driving cars can only drive in theaters where they've been trained, because autonomous training is always specific by neighborhood? are you saying that if a particular region has some novel terrain that all previous training must be discarded?
The United States is one pretty warmongerish nation by any account.
Compared to other modern nations, but compared to history vary peaceful.
It is not childish to aspire to be better.
Seems to me that most of our friends in the balkans that have memory of the past wars are overall pretty happy about the current state of things, and there hasn't been wars to contend Alsace-Lorraine in 80 years, is it a record already?
War is very much not a given in the civilized world
Powerless without american hardware and intelligence: You wish. Big tech is spending so much lobbying our governments in fear of us leaving them for open solutions, or god forbid paying fair amount of taxes.
And regarding intelligence, we would have been so much better without the CIA & co spying our politicians and messing with our governments, aiding and sponsoring domestic right wing terrorism for the past 50 years.
the only reason we dont have antimatter weapons or gravity guns is because we haven't figured out how.
That's the state today. Throughout history there's been a long negotiation about what weapons have been allowed in combat.