Pokémon Go scans trained the navigation tech now headed into military drones

For years, Pokémon Go players filmed the streets, parks and buildings around them to earn in-game rewards. According to reporting by the Dutch newspaper Trouw, the roughly 30 billion environmental scans collected that way now belong to Niantic Spatial and helped train a camera-based navigation model that a U.S. defense contractor is preparing to put into drones and military robots.

From Pokéstop videos to a positioning system

Since 2021 the game has asked players to record short videos of real-world locations, called Pokéstops, for extra items. Players could opt in to 360-degree scans under terms that granted Niantic a transferable, sublicensable license to resell the imagery. Floris De Hingh, a 34-year-old Dutch player who downloaded the game on its first day in 2016, told Trouw he never connected his footage to a system that would steer military drones: "I was just playing a game." The scans became raw material for a Visual Positioning System, which locates a camera by matching what it sees against a detailed 3D model of the world rather than relying on satellites. Niantic Spatial CTO Brian McClendon, who previously led the teams behind Google Maps, Earth and Street View, has said the approach suits robots working where GPS drops out, in dense cities and in places where signals are deliberately blocked.

The defense partnership

On 16 December 2025, Niantic Spatial announced a partnership with Vantor, the defense and intelligence firm formerly known as Maxar Intelligence, to fuse ground-level visual positioning with Vantor's aerial navigation software. Vantor's Raptor, launched in February 2025, matches a drone's camera feed against proprietary 3D terrain data; the companies say a drone overhead and an operator below can then share coordinates in real time without a satellite link. Vantor names GPS "unavailability, spoofing, interference, and jamming" as the vulnerability it targets. Field testing was planned for early 2026, and Vantor holds a follow-on award worth $70 million from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

What the companies say — and what they don't

Asked whether the military-bound system relies on Pokémon Go imagery, Vantor told Trouw it would not use the game's data, but declined to say whether the model it plans to deploy was trained on those scans. Niantic Spatial said the scans trained an "early version" of its navigation model, and had no new information on the defense partnership. Jeroen van den Hoven, a professor of ethics and technology at TU Delft, told Trouw: "Without the huge number of scans from all those gamers, the development of this system would never have progressed so quickly." Once scans are folded into a model, he added, tracing them back becomes nearly impossible.

Niantic itself grew out of Keyhole, a mapping firm funded in 2003 by In-Q-Tel, the venture arm financed by the CIA; in 2025 its games business was sold to Saudi Arabia's Savvy Games Group for $3.5 billion.