{"id":224048,"date":"2026-03-16T00:15:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-16T04:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/16\/pokemon-go-player-photos-help-delivery-robots-sparks-privacy-debate\/"},"modified":"2026-03-16T01:05:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-16T05:05:07","slug":"pokemon-go-player-photos-help-delivery-robots-sparks-privacy-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/16\/pokemon-go-player-photos-help-delivery-robots-sparks-privacy-debate\/","title":{"rendered":"Pok\u00e9mon Go Player Photos Help Delivery Robots, Sparks Privacy Debate"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/indianexpress.com\/article\/trending\/trending-globally\/move-over-gps-how-pokemon-go-players-built-inch-perfect-map-for-delivery-robots-10584198\/\">Pok\u00e9mon Go Player Photos Help Delivery Robots, Sparks Privacy Debate<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/indianexpress.com\/article\/trending\/trending-globally\/move-over-gps-how-pokemon-go-players-built-inch-perfect-map-for-delivery-robots-10584198\/\">https:\/\/indianexpress.com\/article\/trending\/trending-globally\/move-over-gps-how-pokemon-go-players-built-inch-perfect-map-for-delivery-robots-10584198\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-03-16 00:15:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"indianexpress.com\">indianexpress.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"article-read-time\">3 min read<\/span><span class=\"city_article\">New Delhi<\/span><span class=\"date_update\" itemprop=\"dateModified\" content=\"2026-03-16T09:45:44+05:30\">Mar 16, 2026 09:45 AM IST<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Popular scavenger-hunt game Pok\u00e9mon Go turned city streets into an augmented-reality playground globally nearly a decade ago. Now, the data generated by its players may soon help guide delivery robots with groceries and hot meals.<\/p>\n<p>Niantic\u2019s spatial computing division, Niantic Spatial, announced a partnership with Coco Robotics, a company that builds small autonomous robots designed for short-distance food and grocery deliveries. The collaboration aims to use Niantic\u2019s Visual Positioning System (VPS) to help robots navigate sidewalks and dense urban environments more accurately, Popular Science reported.<\/p>\n<p>According to the report, Niantic\u2019s VPS technology can determine a device\u2019s location with centimetre-level precision by analysing nearby buildings, landmarks, and other visual cues.<\/p>\n<p>The system was trained on more than 30 billion images captured by Pok\u00e9mon Go players over the years as they explored the real world searching for digital creatures.<\/p>\n<p>Over the years, Pok\u00e9mon Go encouraged players to wander the streets and parks, search for characters like Pikachu, and view their surroundings through their phone camera. The report added that the game attracted nearly 230 million monthly active players worldwide.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt turns out that getting Pikachu to realistically run around and getting Coco\u2019s robot to safely and accurately move through the world is actually the same problem,\u201d Popular Science quoted Niantic Spatial CEO John Hanke in a recent interview with MIT Technology Review.<\/p>\n<p>By analysing images of the same locations captured by different players, Niantic\u2019s system can account for changes in lighting, weather conditions, angles, and perspectives. According to the company, this large-scale, crowdsourced visual dataset makes VPS particularly effective in environments where GPS signals can be unreliable.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Pokemon Go players unknowingly helped train delivery robots after generating over&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/indianexpress.com\/article\/trending\/trending-globally\/move-over-gps-how-pokemon-go-players-built-inch-perfect-map-for-delivery-robots-10584198\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Pok\u00e9mon Go Player Photos Help Delivery Robots, Sparks Privacy Debate https:\/\/indianexpress.com\/article\/trending\/trending-globally\/move-over-gps-how-pokemon-go-players-built-inch-perfect-map-for-delivery-robots-10584198\/ Publish Date: 2026-03-16 00:15:00&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":224049,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/images.indianexpress.com\/2026\/03\/Pokemon-Go-delivery-robots.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-privacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224048"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224048"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":224050,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224048\/revisions\/224050"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}