BowlBot 5000 is a CGI animation, folks. Return to your homes.
Another day, another video of a robot engaging in some weird stuff that ultimately turns out to be completely fake.
A video showing a robotic arm picking up a bowling ball and hurling it down a lane has gone viral across Twitter and all of social media in the last few hours. The video, which claims to show off the abilities of BowlBot 5000, is of course completely fake.
Here's the original video taken from Vimeo, made by Tom Coben.
BowlBot 5000 from Tom Coben on Vimeo.
And just to show how quickly fake videos spread across social media, here's a few examples of it on Twitter.
Absolutely YEETS that ball down the lane. https://t.co/GrmyR5fGDC
— Carl Anka (@Ankaman616) July 4, 2019
So, what's the actual story? Well, as you can probably guess, Tom Coben is a motion graphics designer and has designed a couple of videos that feature robots, or in one case, an iguana that shoots lasers out of its nostrils.
Like the crazy rollercoaster in South Korea or about a dozen other fake videos, it also came from Reddit and was then quickly reshared on Facebook, Twitter with people often not realising that what they were watching was, in fact, some very decent CGI.
Also, for you physics students out there, the video is also totally impossible for another reason. The rotations of the mechanical arm's spin wouldn't have had any effect on the velocity speed of the bowling ball or its trajectory.
So, yeah, fake video. Return to your homes. Nothing to see here.