ROCHESTER HILLS, Mich. (WXYZ) — Evan Kornhaus is taking us to school on Pokemon Go.
"So now I got to look around - see if I can find it," Evan said. "boom Pokémon is right there. So what I do is I just throw a poke ball at it and then I can start catching it."
OU Engineering Sciences students say they've been catching Pokémon since 2016.
"Everyone's going around walking like this (with their heads down). And you're like what's everybody doing there? So of course you want to try it yourself," Evan said.
"Once you get to level 40, it's hard to level up," said Polly Gene Bates.
Senior Joshua Pagonas flashes us his level 41 status.
"Typically a player over level 40 have even playing for a while and this is pretty much apart of their everyday life," Joshua said.
And OU's augmented reality center director Khalid Mirza explained the science of how company Niantic is making childhood Pokémon dreams come true.
"That ball resting on the floor, that's augmented reality. It needs to understand this floor is where it is in 3D to make that happen," Mirza said.
"And that would not be possible without the scan?" I asked.
"Yeah, without understanding the 3D nature of the world in front of you," Mirza said.
So why are we talking about Pokémon Go? Because it's developer, Niantic, in this blog post, announced what it's been doing while users are hunting Pokémon on their daily walks.
"The last 10 years they've been collecting data. What their announcement is they're using it to build an AI - an AI that can help navigate a 3D world," Mirza said.
The post calls the project a large geospatial model. The machine learning means it's AI, and they're teaching it by using things captured by user's phone scans coupled with location info from smart phones.
"You can imagine how big of a task it is to map the entire world," Mirza said. "This is one of the first ones where they've massively collected a large amount of Data in the entire world globally that can used to be trained AI that can actually map the entire world."
With 10 million locations scanned globally and one million fresh scans a week, the AI navigation system being fed that data will have "human-like understanding" and unlike 3D streetview maps which only get the facade, it'll be able to recognize buildings and places from all angles, because the data collected through Pokémon Go player scans from anywhere a phone can go.
"Now you wanted data in that area? Make it a hunt. Thousands and Thousands of people Are naturally going to collect that data for you," Mirza said. "Now you wanted data in that area? Make it a hunt. Thousands and Thousands of people Are naturally going to collect that data for you."
Niantic said in a statement, in part, that the scan feature is optional and people have to visit a publicly accessible location. It ends by saying that right now this is a research project and a long time from being a product.
"Certainly it's a clever way but the real question is did they make the game and then realized They we could do this. Or they said this is the way we can collect data," Mirza said.
The engineering students supplying this data honestly don't care either way.
"I just mainly play the game for fun. I'm not really thinking too much about the potential millions and millions of scans," Joshua said.
"I think it's pretty cool they have a digital copy of our world," Polly said.
"'m not going to stop anytime soon," Evan said.
