Authors
Claim
A video of a tiny dinosaur in a puddle of water on the street has been widely viewed on Twitter.
Originally posted in Hindi, the tweet says, “Now only his arrival was left in 2020.” This post received 5.5K views, 113 retweets and 439 likes at the time of writing this fact check.
We received a request on Twitter to verify this video.
Fact Check
Amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and after all the strange we’ve read or seen around us, this Twitter post doesn’t seem all that odd. But note, this may not be what it seems at first glance.
We first searched the web using keywords related to this video and post but found nothing that explained the occurrence of a tiny dinosaur in a water puddle on a street.
Going back to the video, we noticed the tiny dinosaur walking only on the water puddle and not moving away from it. We also noticed a few bystanders throwing water on it, but it didn’t seem to distract the dinosaur enough to walk away from the little water-marked area it kept going around.
Considering this situation, we suspected this may be the work of some kind of technology. We then began to Google search relevant technology terms that could be associated with creating an image/ illusion/ reality of a tiny dinosaur on a street. We came across augmented reality (AR) which showed that such an incident could’ve probably occurred. Augmented reality let’s us see the world around us as it might seem with our naked eye—with a digital augmentation overlaid.
Continuing our web search we learnt about Google new AR feature which allows you to see animals through 3D cameras. Recently, CreativeBloq.com wrote an article titled, Google’s AR dinosaurs are ridiculously cool, detailing this new feature on Google. You can read more about Google lets you see dinosaurs in the real world through AR here and here.
Reading through the article on CreativeBloq.com we noticed an image of a dinosaur similar to the one in the claim. See below:
A technical tutorial on how you can see a dinosaur in your current environment using Google’s AR feature can be viewed below.
We created our very own augmented reality and saw a dinosaur on one of our colleague’s beds.
You can read about this in our Hindi fact check here.
Conclusion
It’s clear from our research that the dinosaur seen walking in a water puddle on the street was made using an augmented reality feature.
Tools Used
- Google reverse image search
- InVid
Result: Misleading
If you would like us to fact check a claim, give feedback or lodge a complaint, WhatsApp us at 9999499044. You can also visit the Contact Us page and fill the form.
