Niantic just revealed that Pokémon Go players helped build a massive dataset of over 30 billion real-world images through everyday gameplay. The company is now using those scans to power visual navigation for delivery bots, letting them pinpoint locations without GPS. Millions of casual monster hunters essentially mapped the physical world for commercial AI.
Niantic just announced a massive restructuring, selling its gaming division—including Pokémon GO and Pikmin Bloom—to mobile giant Scopely in a deal valued at around $3.85 billion. The company is parting ways with game operations to focus entirely on spatial computing and AI through Niantic Spatial.
Niantic just announced it is building a Large Geospatial Model trained on millions of real-world 3D scans uploaded by Pokémon Go and Ingress players. The goal is to give robots and computers human-like spatial intelligence, using pedestrian-level maps of places cars cannot reach.
Brilliant Labs just unveiled Frame, a $349 pair of smart glasses weighing only 39 grams. Backed by Niantic's CEO, the hardware features a 3,000-nit MicroOLED display and front-facing camera powered by an AI assistant called Noa for visual lookup and translation. Preorders are open now, shipping in April.
Niantic just rolled out generative AI developer tools for its 8th Wall platform, integrating Inworld AI and OpenAI. Devs can now drop interactive AI characters directly into browser AR experiences and use DALL-E to generate custom textures for 3D objects on the fly, backed by two ready-to-test sample projects.
