Watch the video of the bowlbot.
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It’s often difficult to predict what type of video will go viral. As a general rule, the subject matter should be controversial and shocking enough to get peoples’ emotions excited (or riled up) so that they feel they need to share it to others.
Of course, with people being deluged with all sorts of news, simply being controversial and shocking is sometimes not enough. Some people, in a bid to create enough of a shock effect, have resorted to scripted scenes or even special effects just to get people to share their video. And the funny thing is, they often succeed.
Even if the video is later proven to be a fake, they already achieved the goal of going viral and gaining some fame (or notoriety) for the one who made it. And such was the case for that video showing a BowlBot 5000 hitting an impressive strike on the bowling alley.
The original video was first uploaded by Tom Coben to the video-sharing site Vimeo. The video shows an automated arm grabbing a bowling ball before spinning it at eye-boggling speed before finally releasing it to score a strike down the bowling alley.
The video quickly went viral and when Coben also shared it on Twitter, it got roughly 70,000 retweets.
But if you thought that you finally found evidence that bowling athletes have now become obsolete, think again. Coben has admitted that the robot is computer-generated. That shouldn’t be surprising since Coben works as a motion graphics designer. He even had another video which featured an iguana that shot lasers from its nostrils so creating a bowling bot was probably a piece of cake for him.
It’s small comfort that Coben isn’t the first one to release a fake video that the Internet just lapped up. In June 2019, a seemingly terrifying park ride in South Korea turned out to be fake. There was also that video of a “Boston Dynamics” robot being abused by humans until it finally decided to fight back.
It spawned all sorts of Terminator references until the video’s creators released a short clip that showed that the “robot” was actually a human wearing a motion-capture suit.
In any case, not everyone was taken in by the BowlBot 5000 video. For one, experts say that the robotic arm’s spin wouldn’t have an effect on the ball’s direction.
It’s not like Coben was out to intentionally deceive people. Coben himself was quite forthright about the video, saying: “I guess I have to mention that this is a computerized robot, not a real bowling robot.” But despite adding hashtags that it was a 3D animation, it turns out people rarely bother to read the fine print, so to speak.
Still, it goes to show how far realistic-looking computer graphics have progressed to the point that one really needs to do research to verify if what one is seeing is real or just the figment of someone’s overly active imagination.