I think the most difficult thing about navigating modern life for me is the impossibility of doing no harm to the world around you. PoGo is a children’s game to help you get out and exercise more, but if you play it, you’re complicit in modern genocide in Gaza or the destruction of Lebanon or whoever has decided to weaponize your favorite franchise from when you were six:
The players have indirectly, perhaps minimally but still effectively, contributed to military applications.
Saudi Arabia owns Pokemon Go
What? No Tik-Tok level shitfit from Trump?
If you ever played Ingress, you’d know Pokemon Go is just a skin for it that Niantic applied 3 years later. Literally the same nodes you battle over were now just Pokemon gyms. All the user setup nodes, the proxy battles, landmark nodes, etc. now just Pokemon theme. Literally the same game, but got Pokemon skin.
So unless catching Pokemon as a side-game is what the military is just now grabbing onto, I find it hard to believe they just ignored Niantics’s Ingress structure and mapping for 16 years…
I think they released a new reskin of their product line last year in the guise of Monster Hunter which is also similar to Ingress and Go.
And the Harry Potter game.
no shit?
huh…guess I have a bet to collect now.
I was called a conspiracy theorist for dropping the game the first time I heard they were selling data generated from users on the app in 2018.
If you didn’t nuke your account, you may be able to sell some of the Pokemon, at least there used to be ways to do that.
Great. Now we can all shout, “….bUt HeRrrr StArTeR chOicE!!!”
The article suggests visual scans—presumably of Pokéstops and what not—could be used in drone navigation when GPS is jammed. Wouldn’t Street View be far more appropriate for that?
Playgrounds and hospital atriums are generally not mapped well on street view.
Scans include more information than just pictures, as it’s tied with metrics of azimuth/yaw/pitch/roll/etc.
It gets outdated pretty quickly, and only covers where they can drive. Not to mention, if you can crowdsource it, you don’t have to do it at all.
Never played Pokémon Go myself, partly because it felt weirdly invasive - and now I’m kinda glad to know I was somewhat justified
