alt Hacker News> The overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone heavy theaters of war is a tiny sliver (or zero?).
But presumably the images/models at ground level can be used to train/improve the general performance of Vantor's aerial (satelite based) navigation system so it works better elsewhere?
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well the article writes AS IF the whole intention was to:
"get data for drone warfare" ...in 2021 (before the russian invasion...)
but did we even EXPECT drone warfare to influence the war THIS MUCH back then?
well not me -- I actually thought russia would beat the crap out of ukraine within a month (even after the failed spetsnaz attack on zelensky)
the article's assumptions only makes sense IF some people had time machines, or if CIA has some know-everything future prophet
(not to mention: drones need TOP TO BOTTOM view, not bottom-to-top view)
anyway, my verdict: sensational yellow journal article, nothing more/less
No the tech doesn’t work like that AFAIK. The most common use case is exactly localization (think “HD maps” for autonomous cars).
It almost 1-1 data correlation, n-phone Pokémon go scans of a location helping a drone locate itself in the same location in correlation with Maxar’s satellite data.
There maybe some hyper corner case uses. Maybe the billion scans in New York City help them generalize across different phone lenses characteristics, but phone and drone lenses are so different.
Would love to hear some specifics if I’m wrong here.