Perhaps, perhaps not - I have my theories, but is that not what you meant when you said Pokemon Go was built on the same engine as Ingress?
I do think it wasn't until after Pokemon Go launched and they saw the success of it, that they shifted focus to be more of a platform for these types of experiences (see Niantic Lightship). Additionally, I think Unity offered them the opportunity to integrate with ARCore and collect much more detailed data than they would've ever been able to do on the old Ingress engine. In fact, I expect a significant chunk of ARCore functionality was added specifically thanks to Niantic and Unity (in fact, you see Unity mentioned all over the Google Developer docs for it).
> And training data isn't of people walking, but from images they've produced while catching pokemons or something?
Training data is people taking dedicated video of locations. Only ARCore supported devices can submit data as well. So I assume along with the video they're also collecting a good chunk of other data such as depth maps, accelerometer, gyrometer, magnetometer data, GPS, and more.
Pokemon Go was launched on the Unity game engine in 2016. Ingress was using a different game engine at the time, and wasn't rewritten into Unity until several years later. Even the backend/server side was significantly different, with them needing to write a shim to ensure compatibility during & after the move to Unity.
For further clarity, this is for NTLM hashes. And the entire article is indeed clickbait and considering the numbers they're referencing, they likely came from this tweet [1] which the article doesn't link as a source at all.
I do think it wasn't until after Pokemon Go launched and they saw the success of it, that they shifted focus to be more of a platform for these types of experiences (see Niantic Lightship). Additionally, I think Unity offered them the opportunity to integrate with ARCore and collect much more detailed data than they would've ever been able to do on the old Ingress engine. In fact, I expect a significant chunk of ARCore functionality was added specifically thanks to Niantic and Unity (in fact, you see Unity mentioned all over the Google Developer docs for it).