By Hazel Gandhi
A video showing a robot playing badminton against two players is viral online as a real incident. BOOM found that the claims are false and the video has been edited using computer generated imagery (CGI) to replace the man in the original video with a robot.
The 20-second video purports to shows how easily the robot is playing badminton against two players at the same time.
A caption on Facebook reads, "Unbelievable Showdown: Robot vs. Human in Badminton. Witness the future of sports right here. This epic badminton rally between a cutting-edge robot and a human player is mind-blowing. Video Credits: Huge shoutout to the amazing @BadmintonEnthusiast for sharing this mind-blowing rally."
Click here to view the post and here for an archive.
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FACT CHECK
BOOM found that the video has been edited using CGI and the original video does not show a robot competing with the opponents.
A reverse image search of some key visuals from the viral video led us to several posts on TikTok that had shared the same video. One of the comments under a video shared by @magicalmagicworld suggested how the video was digitally altered to replace a human with the robot.
Taking a clue from this, we then ran a reverse image search of visuals from the video that did not include the robot but just the two opponents and found a video shared on Facebook on October 21, 2021 by a page called 'Phalore bedmation club'
The video was an exact match to our viral video with one exception-- it showed a grown man in a black t-shirt competing with two opponents.
Here is a comparison between the viral video and the original video.
BOOM could not independently verify when the CGI video was first shared or who created it.
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