Portal Scanning - Is the data going to be of public benefit?

It's clear that the portal scanning is Niantic collecting data en masse on ARCore/ARKit tracking. In other words, they want a ton of videos of people walking circles around objects to use that data to improve AR. Cool, that's totally fine, and I'm going to have bronze of the badge in a few hours.

However - projects like ARCore, which are free and open ( https://github.com/google-ar/arcore-android-sdk ) provide a wide benefit to the world in terms of AR and VR tracking, and improving these tools can, in the long run, lead to things being better for everyone. Since Niantic is crowdsourcing this data for free, ie, no payment to the end-user who does the scanning, it should make sense that Niantic is using this for benefit outside of their IPs (Pokemon Go, Ingress, etc), or, at the very least, the data should end up open to the public or the projects that could benefit from the pool of tracking data in the future.

Is this data going to be beneficial, or at least available, to AR/VR based projects in the future? Or is Niantic planning to keep this data private, despite the free crowdsourcing nature of the project? An answer would be appreciated. @NianticBrian or @NianticCasey, if either of you know, I would love to know as well. Thank you :)

Comments

  • DMiliarakisDMiliarakis ✭✭✭
    edited April 2020

    They most likely will be used in other games, that they have yet to create and via scanning, we are doing f̶o̶r̶ ̶f̶r̶e̶e̶ a part of them. I don't really expect any straight forward answer from Niantic. Only time will tell...

  • JeroenixJeroenix ✭✭✭

    My guess would be that, for the right price, the data could be sold to other companies under a license. Compare it with the Unreal Engine, that's in loads of games as well, and the original coders still receive licensensing fees for that.

    Only here, Niantic gets it for free by us! :)

  • AkceptorUAAkceptorUA ✭✭✭✭

    We are not paying for the game either.

  • HydracyanHydracyan ✭✭✭✭✭

    Niantic is paying us with a medal and a free game.

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