Comment by abroszka33
7 hours ago
I like Pokemon Go and play almost every day. I did this scan one time and then stopped. The rewards are not worth the hassle. I don't think many players are doing it. It's just very weird to stand somewhere and scan an object.
I also wouldn't say 'unknowingly trained', it's pretty obvious what it does, and I think the game even tells you that they want to understands how the POI looks like in 3D.
> I don't think many players are doing it.
Do we have to think? Apparently they amassed 30B images. :)
30B images isn't that much in the context of Pokemon Go playerbase of ~50 million (conservative estimate based on users today). That's about 600 images per person, in a game that has been out since 2016... that's pretty low adoption as the previous user said. I don't think the quest has been out since 2016, but considering a large fraction of users are basically daily users, it's still quite a small number of images.
That 30B could just be the useful set after cleanup.
My son showed me how he does these quests: he points the phone at the floor and just wiggles it back and forth.
My friend did this. He always took pictures of his feet. He was banned from submitting scans and Wayfarer for a few years. He just got access back.
We joke that maybe PoGo didn't get any benefit from his data, but someone did.
Your son is a bad data point.
Aww... shucks. I'm such a proud father.
Bad for some goals, good for others.
Haha :D Good tip, I will try that too.
exactly. that is why i doubt they will get actual navigable information out of it.
To maintain that take, wouldn't you need to offer a plausible way that Niantic managed to train their Visual Positioning System using that data if the data was all bad?
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I used to just record the ground and even leave out my feet, but apparently they detect and ban people who do this too often now. The data was always going somewhere shady, but after the sale it is even worse so I just stopped completely. At best you get a poffin or rare candy and that absolutely is not worth it.
I'd imagine it's not just the research quests, but it's submissions for new stops, too.
Same, I do it once in a great while. Give me a rare candy or rare candy XL per scan and you’ll find me jumping all over the neighborhood!