Niantic's geospatial model is using geolocation data from scans players submit of real-world locations while playing the company's mobile games.

The blog post explains that “Over the past five years, Niantic has focused on building our Visual Positioning System (VPS), which uses a single image from a phone to determine its position and orientation using a 3D map built from people scanning interesting locations in our games and Scaniverse,

Data captured from Pokémon Go and other games are being used to create large AI models that can predict what buildings and other objects look like.