As a dev, I have been using private scans for my VPS apps so far, they’re really easy to use and test with the remote auth tool, even test at home, etc. More importantly, private scans let me be quite flexible with the particular case I am after: I can scan an entire area, like a park, and then use all the scans to overlay a mesh on real geometry (achieving far-away occlusion and navigation manipulation) and just one scan for the localization part.
Thinking ahead, I believe this functionality will be necessary for my app if I decide to publish it. But, since private scans exist for me only and since they have a time-limit period, I am bound to replace them with public scans. But this would mean that I won’t have a mesh of the entire park, i.e. my app will be useless.
So, my question is simple: when thinking of a commercial release using vps, would it be a good idea for Niantic to reconsider the way private scans are used and let devs use private scans in their releases if they wish instead of just public ones?
While it is unlikely that private scans will be supported for non-development purposes in the near future, I’ve gone ahead and raised your input as a feature request for consideration by the team.
In the interim, is there a notable publicly accessible location that would make for a good VPS-activated wayspot location for your use-case? If so, it may be possible to nominate a new wayspot there and go through the VPS-activation process while still generating your occlusion meshes via the private scan process. Then, you could position these occlusion meshes relative to the publicly available VPS-activated wayspot via the remote content authoring tool and use the public wayspot as intended for localization. While you wouldn’t need the private scans for localization purposes in this scenario, you could still use the generated mesh for occlusion purposes against a publicly available VPS-activated wayspot.
As a note, you may want to delete the private scans in this scenario after downloading the meshes from the My Meshes page in order to prevent localization against the private scan locations and ensure your players can successfully localize against the publicly available VPS-activated wayspot.
thanks for clarifying that. This is a potential solution.
However I still feel that there may be other issues that will come up with such a setup - for example, continuous localization could not be supported this way (unless I nominate a bunch of public wayspots around the area, which won’t be too good for other users trying to localize to just one spot, etc) - meaning that this setup won’t be as flexible as any developer would want to.
Still, I will wait to see what Niantic has in store for us, as I believe that the far-away occlusion issue is a strong selling point for VPS (it is at least to me).
In addition to the current solution above, we’re pleased to let you know that there will be an additional set of real-time scanning tools that will become available as part of Lightship in the coming months. This scanning framework will allow for runtime environment scanning that may be useful to your application’s use-case.
You may want to keep an eye on the Announcements category for more information when the scanning framework becomes available.