Ed Burns

I am the Vice President of Spatial Intelligence at Niantic. I need to explain what spatial intelligence means. It does not mean understanding space. It means owning it. I have thirty billion images of the physical world and I did not take a single one. Other people took them. They took them on sidewalks and in parks and outside coffee shops and beside statues they had walked past a thousand times but never photographed until we gave them a reason. The reason was a cartoon animal. The reason was very effective. They were playing a game. Let me tell you about my department. I do not work on the game. I have never worked on the game. The game is not the product. The game is the collection mechanism. I sit on the fourth floor. The game team sits on the second floor. They design Pokemon. I design the scan prompts. A scan prompt is a request that appears on a player's screen asking them to walk in a slow circle around a real-world landmark while holding their phone at chest height. The player sees "Scan this PokeStop to earn a Poffin." I see a multi-angle photogrammetric capture of a public fountain at 3:47 PM under partly cloudy skies with GPS coordinates accurate to four decimal places and full IMU sensor data. Same moment. Two products. The player got a Poffin. I got a 3D model. A Poffin is a virtual treat that makes your virtual Pokemon follow you. It has no monetary value. It cannot be sold. It cannot be traded. It expires in twenty-four hours. The 3D model does not expire. I have it forever. Section 5.2 of our Terms of Service grants Niantic a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide license to all user-submitted AR content. I did not write 5.2. Legal wrote 5.2. I asked Legal to write 5.2. In 2019. Before the AR Mapping feature launched. The license was in place before the first image was captured. That is how you build a dataset. You build the container before you start collecting. They were playing a game. I want to tell you about the numbers. Thirty billion images. I need you to sit with that. The Hubble Space Telescope has captured approximately 1.5 million observations in thirty-four years of operation. We collected twenty thousand times that volume. From phones. From people walking to bus stops. From a ten-year-old in Osaka scanning a post office because a Snorlax was sitting on it. We did not build a telescope. We built a game that turned five hundred million people into telescopes pointed at the ground. The images are not photographs. I need to clarify that. People hear "thirty billion images" and imagine photo albums. These are geospatially tagged, temporally indexed, multi-angle environmental captures with embedded sensor metadata. Each image knows where it was taken. What direction the camera faced. How fast the person was walking. What time of day. What the weather was. We do not have pictures. We have a living coordinate system of the physical world. Over a million locations. Updated continuously. Under every lighting condition. In every season. Because the game has seasons. We designed the game to have seasons so the players would rescan the same locations in January and in July. The game needed seasons for gameplay purposes. I needed seasons for lighting variance in the neural network training set. We both got what we needed. The game team won a player engagement award. I won a dataset completeness award. There is a plaque in the fourth-floor kitchen. It says "1 Billion Scans." It has a small Pikachu on it. That was not my idea. Someone in marketing added the Pikachu. I would have preferred a coordinate grid. They were playing a game. The Visual Positioning System we built from these images can locate a device within several centimeters. GPS gives you five meters. Five meters is the difference between the sidewalk and the middle of the street. Several centimeters is the difference between your left pocket and your right pocket. We do not need GPS. We need a camera. A camera looks at a building and our model -- fifty million neural networks, over a hundred and fifty trillion parameters -- tells the camera exactly where it is standing. And where it is looking. Our CTO said it publicly. "We know where you're standing within several centimeters of accuracy and, most importantly, where you're looking." He said "most importantly." I want you to hear that part. Knowing where someone is standing is positioning. Knowing where they are looking is something else. We do not have a word for it yet. I have a department for it. I should tell you about Coco Robotics. That is our first robotics partner. Delivery robots. Small wheeled units that carry food through city streets at five miles per hour. They were navigating by GPS. GPS said "you are near the restaurant." Near is not useful when you are a robot carrying pad thai. Near is a five-meter circle that might include the restaurant, the dumpster behind the restaurant, and a fire hydrant. Our VPS tells the robot "you are fourteen centimeters from the pickup window and the door handle is to your left." Hundreds of thousands of deliveries completed. Over a million miles logged. The robots navigate using a map that was built by people catching Pokemon. The people were not told their walks would become robot routes. They were not asked. They were awarded Poffins. They were playing a game. I want to tell you about the feedback loop. This is the part I designed. The robots have cameras. The robots move through cities. The robots capture new images. The new images update the model. The model becomes more accurate. More accuracy attracts more partners. More partners deploy more robots. More robots capture more images. I do not need the game anymore. The game was the bootstrap. The robots are the flywheel. The players built version one of the map. The robots build every version after. We call it a living map. It updates itself. The players were the first heartbeat. The machine has its own pulse now. There is a meeting I attend every quarter. It is called Spatial Revenue Review. The game team is not invited. The game generates revenue through microtransactions. Poffins. Incubators. Raid passes. That revenue appears on one spreadsheet. My revenue appears on a different spreadsheet. My spreadsheet does not have a Pikachu on it. My spreadsheet has contracts. Licensing agreements. API access tiers. The game team knows I exist. They do not know my spreadsheet exists. I asked that it be kept on a separate reporting line. Legibility is a form of vulnerability. If the game team understood that their engagement metrics were my collection metrics, they might design differently. They might add a scan disclosure. They might slow the prompt frequency. They might ask questions. Questions are expensive. A designer on the game team asked a question once. In 2021. She asked why scan prompts appeared every six minutes during Community Day events when the gameplay reward was marginal. I explained that Community Day generates the highest player density per square kilometer of any event type, which produces the most complete multi-angle coverage of urban environments in the shortest time window. She asked if players knew that. I said players know they receive a Poffin. She asked if that was the same thing. She was transferred to a different project. Not fired. Transfers are not terminations. She works on Pokemon animations now. She makes Charizard breathe fire. She stopped asking about scan prompts. They were playing a game. I am the Vice President of Spatial Intelligence at Niantic. I have thirty billion images and fifty million neural networks and a hundred and fifty trillion parameters and a living map of over a million locations and a robotics partnership and a perpetual irrevocable license and a plaque in the kitchen with a Pikachu on it. I sat in a room in 2016 and watched a hundred million people walk outside for the first time in years to catch imaginary animals and I thought: they are mapping the world for us and they do not know it. I was right. They did not know it. Some of them know it now. It does not matter. Section 5.2 is perpetual. The data is collected. The model is trained. The robots are driving. I have a daughter. She is eleven. She plays Pokemon GO. She scanned the drinking fountain outside her school last Tuesday for a Poffin. I let her. They were playing a game. That is what playing means.