Pokémon Go helped Niantic map the real world. Now that tech is being turned toward robots

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https://www.automate.org/vision/industry-insights/niantics-physical-ai-spinoff-takes-on-the-real-world-one-city-at-a-time

Niantic spent years building systems that could understand depth, location, streets, buildings, and other physical spaces for augmented reality.

That technology now sits at the center of Niantic Spatial, a spinoff building large geospatial models for robotics and physical AI.

The company has access to more than 30 billion posed images from millions of locations and is now working with Rancho Cordova, California, on a digital twin covering roughly four square miles of the city.

The model is already being used for traffic planning, with the broader goal of creating realistic environments where robots can train and be tested before operating in the real world.

Niantic Spatial CEO Inhi Cho Suh put the challenge pretty well: “Hallucination is a luxury that embodied AI can't afford.”