Within days of Pokémon Go launching ten years ago on July 7, millions of people were hunting digital creatures overlaid on the physical world. By mid-September 2016, the game had lost roughly four-fifths of its American players, but dedicated users never gave up. Starting in 2021, players could opt in to scan real-world locations with their phone cameras, uploading tagged images in exchange for in-game perks. By 2024, Niantic claimed to be ingesting roughly a million new scans per week. Last May, Niantic sold its games, including Pokémon Go, to Scopely for $3.5 billion. Niantic kept the data and AI models, spinning them out into a new company called Niantic Spatial. That company’s first public product is a visual positioning system that can pinpoint a location to within a few centimeters using only a handful of images. The company announced a partnership with Coco Robotics, which operates roughly a thousand last-mile delivery robots across American and European cities, to help the machines navigate urban environments where GPS routinely fails. Niantic Spatial's model, trained on billions of images taken by Pokémon Go players at specific locations over years, can locate a robot precisely enough to ensure it stops at exactly the right doorstep.