A part of me likes this. Every now and then, isn’t it nice to pursue something and just see where it goes, without a monetization strategy or similar?

According to their website :

Neural mapping. Taking 5 minutes to build a scene in space.

Relocalization estimating camera pose from a single image.

https://nianticlabs.com/news/largegeospatialmodel?hl=en

It looks pretty cool. I imagine it could be a game changer in wearable devices that want to use position like AR.

Intelligence gathering is also another one. Being able to tell where someone is based on a Picture is a huge one. Not just limited to outdoors but presumably indoors as well. Crazy stuff

They have a "VPS" which extracts keypoints from an image and matches them against a 3d pointcloud. Using trigonometry you can work out the 3d position of the camera by matching the keypoints from the image to the keypoints in the point cloud.

What is different is that they are proposing to make a large ML model to do all of the matching, rather than having a database and some matching algorithm.

Will it work? probably, will it scale? I'm not that hopeful, but then I was wrong about LLMs.

Stalking and OSINT:

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.