How Pokémon Go helped three hikers lost in the mountains find their way home

The mobile game Pokémon Go has been a key tool to prevent three users from getting lost in the mountains, helping them find their way back thanks to its maps created by the community of players with the Open Street Maps (OSM) model, which allows the users themselves to those who register new routes in the game.

Developed by Niantic for mobile devices, Pokémon Go is location-based and uses maps created with real-world locations to find and capture characters from the Pokémon saga.

To do this, it makes use of Open Street Maps (OSM), a tool similar to the Google Maps or Apple Maps applications with which, through an open source platform, it is lto its own user community who, voluntarily, collaborates in the creation of the game maps including elements from the real world.

It has been precisely this function and the possibility that the players themselves can register new paths on the map, which has prevented three users from getting lost while taking a route through the mountain.

This is the case of the Norwegian games researcher Helga Dis Isfold Sigurdardottir who, on a trip through Spain this summer, took a route through a mountain forest that ended up with her and her two companions disoriented, not knowing how to return to the starting point.

As explained by Sigurdardottir and collected by Niantic through NRK, when they realized they were lost, the hikers They tried to use services like Google Maps to find a path that would guide them back to the starting point. However, the forest was full of trails what They didn’t appear in the app from Google, so they found no answer.

After two hours trying to find the right path they decided to rest and, in the meantime, Sigurdardottir opened the Pokémon Go application to entertain himself. Thus, she was surprised to discover that the game map showed on the screen routes that did not appear en Google Maps.

“Roads appeared that were not on Google Maps, but that fit much better with what we saw on the ground,” he said. With this, they were able to follow the routes shown on the Pokémon Go map until they returned to the city from which they had started.

ROUTES OF PLAYERS WITH OSM

Although Google Maps offers very detailed maps and allows options such as Street View to display real images of roads and streets, it usually collects location information through cars and motorcycles, with which it takes photographs and records the streets.

This method makes The focus is to collect common areas and busy placeswhich sometimes leaves aside less common and more difficult to access territories, What are the mountain trails like?.

In the case of Pokémon Go, by basing its maps on the OSM model, it is the users who choose a starting point on the map and, after that, use their smartphone location while walking, as well as capturing images , to create a new route and leave it registered in the game, as Pokémon explains on its help page.

Therefore, it is enough that some users have explored the mountains playing Pokémon Go for them to decide to register new routes based on the trails and, thus, leave them marked in the game. This allows Pokémon Go maps to reach places that other platforms don’t have access to as easily.

With all this, Niantic has pointed out that this incident is another demonstration of “how technology can be an innovative tool” to connect users with the world around them. In this case, he highlighted how some members of the community have prevented other players from “getting lost in their latest adventure.”

NIANTIC’S NEXT 3D MAP

Beyond the current maps offered by the game, Niantic continues to work on new technologies based on the data provided by users in Pokémon Go. In this sense, in November of last year it announced the creation of a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) model that will allow the real world to be mapped in 3D.

Specifically, it is a Large Geospatial Model (LGM) that, powered by AI, can be based on data optionally recorded by users of the company’s services such as Pokémon Go, and that will allow models obtain “spatial understanding” skills.

Thus, with a single image captured from a smartphone, the system allows the user’s position and orientation to be determined, using a 3D map created from the information shared by people who scan locations in the developer’s games and Scaniverse.