hello darkness, my old friend

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(That's a quote from someone who still plays and knows the ins and outs of what's going on.)

When Pokemon Go players scan PokeStops, theyve been unknowingly building a detailed visual model of the world which is being sold to a military contractor to build a no-GPS positioning for the new generation of unmanned killing machines

Screenshots of articles that were reposted separately as images #2-5.

Image #2-4: Article from Haye Kesteloo titled: Pokémon Go Scans Quietly Trained The Navigation Tech Now Headed Into Military Drones.

Body texts reads: Hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players spent years filming the streets, parks, and buildings around them to earn in-game rewards. Those roughly 30 billion environmental scans are now owned by Niantic Spatial, and they helped train a camera-based navigation model that a U.S. defense contractor is preparing to put into drones and other military robots. Most of the players had no idea.

The pipeline runs from a mobile game to the battlefield in three steps. Players scanned the physical world. Niantic Spatial turned those scans into a 3D map that lets a machine locate itself by sight when satellite signal fails. And in December 2025, Niantic Spatial announced a partnership with Vantor, the defense and intelligence firm formerly known as Maxar Intelligence, to fuse that ground-level system with Vantor's aerial navigation software for use in GPS-denied operations.

The collected scans, around 30 billion of them according to Trouw, became the raw material for a Visual Positioning System, or VPS. Where GPS depends on a satellite signal, VPS works out where a camera is by matching what it sees against a detailed 3D model of the world. Two recognizable reference points a few pixels wide can be enough to fix a location. Niantic Spatial CTO Brian McClendon, who previously led the team behind Google Maps, Google Earth, and Street View, has said the approach suits robots operating where GPS regularly drops out, such as dense cities, and where signals are deliberately blocked, such as war zones.

Image #5: Article titled: Vantor Will Pair the Ground Map With Aerial Drone Navigation.

Body text reads: The Vantor partnership, announced on December 16, 2025, joins two positioning systems into one. Niantic Spatial handles localization on the ground by aligning a camera feed against its model. Vantor's Raptor software, launched in February 2025, does the same job in the air using a drone's camera and Vantor's proprietary 3D terrain data. Combined, the companies say, a drone overhead and a vehicle or dismounted operator below can share the same coordinates in real time with no satellite link. The principle is already turning up on the other side of the front, where a drowned Russian drone was found matching living camera feeds against preloaded terrain imagery rather than trusting a single GPS module.