‘Pokemon Go’ Players Just Got a Big Surprise: Watch Where Users Are Pointing Their Phones

Players of “Pokemon Go” are able to do more than just capture virtual monsters when they point their camera phones around.
Niantic, the developer behind the popular mobile game, announced Nov. 12 that players can now scan physical locations to help AI models develop spatial understanding, according to a Nov. 12 news release.
This awareness is innate in humans but apparently difficult to teach a machine.

“As humans, we have ‘spatial understanding’ that means we can fill in these details based on countless similar scenes we’ve encountered before,” Niantic wrote.
“But for machines, this task is extraordinarily difficult. Even the most advanced AI models today struggle to visualize and infer missing parts of a scene, or to imagine a place from a new angle.”

Niantic said, spatial intelligence is the next big frontier in the realm of machine le …