Man Flaps Android-Powered Bird Wings, Flies with Wii Remotes

[javajolt]

British university educated engineer Jarno Smeets claims to have achieved birdlike flight with a set of man-made wings in a video that has spread rapidly around the internet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYW5G2kbrKk&feature=player_embedded#ws

Imagine strapping on a pair of giant multicolored wings, except they’re not actually attached to your arms — you control them without actually touching them, waving your hands up and down in the air, birdlike, causing the wings to move in tandem. Before you know it, you’re up, up and away, rising into the sky like the lovechild of a peacock and an albatross, soaring over the terrain without so much as a single jet turbine or propeller blade.
 
The guy in the video up top — a Dutchman named  Jarno Smeets with mad engineering skills — claims to have done exactly that at a park in south Holland this last weekend on March 18. And all he used to pull it off, in addition to a pair of giant, flexible wings built out of kites and fortified by carbon windsurf masts, was a Wii controller and an HTC smartphone.

Early attempts at flight by mimicking the way birds flap their wings were, to put it mildly, not very successful. But if birds can do it, why don’t airplanes have flapping wings? Because flapping is terribly inefficient compared to mechanical propellers, says Dr. James Usherwood, who has a chapter called “Flying and Walking: Learning from Nature” in the book The Seventy Great Mysteries of the Natural World. For instance, Usherwood notes that a pigeon uses up to four times the energy a helicopter needs to get off the ground.
 
But Smeets was having none of it. “Until now people had assumed that it was impossible to fly with bird-like wings using human muscle power,” reads his press release. To unsettle that assumption, Smeets’ DIY, wireless-haptic driven system for bird-flight employs two Wii controllers and the accelerometers from an HTC Wildfire S smartphone along with Turnigy motors to power 17m2 wings. What’s more, the design “[allows] him to move his arms freely without any risk of breaking them.” That’s perhaps the most striking part of the video — the image of a man rapidly flapping his arms in free-space, as the giant wings above them all but perfectly track their motions.
 
“Ever since I was a little boy I have been inspired by pioneers like Otto Lilienthal, Leonardo da Vinci and also my own grandfather,” writes Smeets. All it took in the end was a little ingenuity, a lot of gumption and about six months of research and development. And by sharing what he did with others through his blog and opening up the design to followers, Smeets was able to essentially crowd-source his way to finished, usable concept.
 
Update: Some are questioning the veracity of the video above, and since we obviously haven't seen the flight firsthand, nor has Smeets yet responded to our request for confirmation the flight was real, we can't vouch for its authenticity at this time (though we can't yet call it inauthentic, either).

[javajolt]

The internet is hysterically flapping its wings over a video that portends to show a man flying. Flying like a bird! But is it real? There's no consensus, but George Lucas' CGI masterminds say it's a big avian hoax.
 
We spoke with Ryan Martin, Technical Director at preeminent Industrial Light & Magic, who not only offered his own take, but that of over a dozen coworkers. He asked me to forgive the delay in their response because they've "all been pretty busy finishing up The Avengers." Yeah.
 
Here's their case:

Okay, so I don't see any glaring visual problems, but that's expected when the quality is as shitty as this. But that's the first thing that makes me question its authenticity. They're able to afford to build this thing, but can't invest in proper video equipment, or... a tripod. If I were to make a fake video with the intention of going viral, I would make certain that the quality was as poor as possible to disguise any flaws in poor cg work. Another big visual issue I have with this video is the stability of his head during flight. Try and keep your head that still while waving your arms up and down when they aren't attached to a giant wing contraption. Still, it seems almost too crazy to be fake and I was unable to find other glaring flaws with the video. So, I've queried our entire facility because we have some pretty amazingly smart people here. Here's what some of them had to say:
 
Employee 1: "without a doubt, fake"
 
Employee 2: (also a pilot) "the camera seems very strange. I know that when I am flying in an airplane, I don't look straight ahead all of the time. Also, the only way people have been able to propel themselves above the ground have been by bicycle arrangements to power a fixed-wing aircraft. A human powered helicopter managed 10 seconds of flight about 5 inches above the ground. The legs are much more powerful than the arms.
 
I have serious doubts about it just on the physics and physiology points alone. "
 
Employee 3: "I agree, I saw that earlier today. I can't spot any glaring visual problems, but the physics just don't add up."
 
Employee 4: "Bad physics, shaky cam with bad focus (always a giveaway) and the most steady head I've ever seen on a guy flapping his arms in order to not break every bone in his body. FAKE."
 
Employee 5: "check out this video
 

and some others....
 http://www.humanbirdwings.net/my-recent-videos/
 
he is talking about the motors that assist his flying, so he isn't flapping all by himself.
 
if its a hoax, its a pretty elaborate hoax, because he has been trying t build up trust for months before hand."
 
Employee 6: " it is a matter of weight ratios! Have a look at the gossamer condor surface area of the wing to sustain flight at 1.5 miles an hour."
 
Employee 7: "6 December 2011,For weeks I have been programming the HTC phone and the Wii remote to work together in order to let them flap my wings in the right movement.",,http://www.humanbirdwings.net/project-timeline/" I've had my wiimote just shut off suddenly without any warning. Sounds like marketing bs or soon to be granted Darwin award."
 
Employee 8: "I constantly see gliders taking off (Fort Funston in Daly City) and It doesn't look right to me:
 
- the motion of the wings and physics looks bogus to me. the flapping motion is weird to me.
 
- the wing cloth, totally looks like cloth simulation. the cloth look structurally too rigid looks like a thick velvet.

- the wing clothing material looks CGI."
 
Employee 9: "Look how steady the GoPro footage is. You seriously think his neck is that stable when flapping his arms? To get that high and not move your head around an inch to take in the view? FAKE"
 
Employee 10: I have to wonder where the power is coming from (where are the batteries, etc). The most efficient for human transportation appears to be a fixed wing aircraft. You can get very good results from a good laminar wingform and a low power engine/motor. His wings will definitely not provide the aerodynamics to haul a 180 pounds in the air. The largest bird had a 23 foot wingspan, and was only 171 pounds. It also had very large pectoral muscles to handle the power needed.
 
Employee 11: "The wing-loading is crazy. ,,Also, a major purpose of a tail on a bird or airplane is to counter-act the forward pitching moment of the wing. If you could get your weight down to about 50 pounds for those wings, you would still find yourself rolling forward. Straight-wing flying wings need a specific twist, or large dihedral, to maintain stable flight (both of which kill lift). The configuration in the video is prone to gerbilling.,,I think the animation cycle on the figure is borrowed from the monkeys in Wizard of Oz."

Emphasis added. Martin even produced a smoking gun:

Okay Sam, They wouldn't let this go without getting to the bottom of it. We've got proof it's faked.
 
The proof comes from one of their other videos and the guys here are genuinely impressed that it's taken so long even for us to determine the truth.
 
These guys are fooling everyone.
 
Watch this video:

At 1:45, you can see a little black square on the fabric

Now, without cutting, the camera pans down and then back up again. When the camera pans up, the wing is cg. You can tell because the model they used didn't have perfect textures
 
It's a pretty good fake, but it is absolutely fake.

Again, emphasis added.
 
We also talked with a CGI brain at Visual Playground, who spotted what he says is another giveaway:
 

Ok...not on the vid...but on their site...a bit of a giveaway. this vid:

contains screen shot of the prototype 3D model of the wing movements. The program is Maya, a 3D program primarily used by CG artists. I would think if this was the engineering vid it claims to be they would be using a 3D modeling program more suited to physics based modeling. Also the toolbar they have loaded atop the program is the 'Cloth Simulation' area of the program, which is used create such effects as fabric wings moving through air...hmmm. This isnt 100% proof but it is strange for them to have such a detailed ANIMATED model in a CG program rather than a engineering one.

So if it's a fake, it's a pretty masterful one. Even the Star Wars guys are impressed.
 
Update: Martin has more refutation out of ILM:

Even more definitive evidence from on of our veteran compositors:

"At 0:18 - the cast shadows of the three fellas on the wings are another giveaway. The shadow on screen right, for example, was created using an articulate of the man himself, then hand-animated and warped to look like a cast shadow on the wing. Watch how the cast shadow does a moon-walk/shuffle, incongruous with the man himself.
 
All that said, it's still very well done. Good stuff. And I truly believe this is a healthy exercise for folks who do this stuff for a living."

[javajolt]

The resume of a man who claims to have achieved bird-like flight through the use of a winged contraption doesn’t check out.
 
The man, who identifies himself as Jarno Smeets, posted a video yesterday of the alleged first flight of the “Human Birdwings” project.
 
Although Wired’s preliminary analysis by physicist Rhett Allain suggests the video is not necessarily a fake, computer graphics and other experts are highly skeptical. What’s more, Wired could not confirm Smeets’ education and employment information posted on Facebook and LinkedIn.
 
A LinkedIn page for Jarno Smeets, which is linked from Smeets’ website, says that he worked at Pailton Steering Systems from 2008 to 2010. John Nollett, the group managing director for Pailton Engineering Limited, said there is no record of anyone by such a name.
 
“We checked with all of our divisions globally and nobody knows him. He’s never worked for us in any of our locations,” Nollett told Wired. “Nobody knows him.”
 
Wired also contacted Coventry University in the UK, where Smeets’ online profiles claim he attended school from 2001 to 2005.
 
The university’s student records staff searched their full digital records database, which contains students’ names who attended from 1986 to the present. They told Wired they found only one entry for anyone by the last name of Smeets: Alexandra Smeets, who attended from 1999 to 2000. No record for Jarno Smeets could be found.
 
The LinkedIn resume and a Facebook page for Smeets also claim that he worked for Philips Design, part of the Philips multinational electronics company. Wired contacted Philips on Wednesday for comment, but no one responded in time for publication.
 
Wired attempted to reach Smeets repeatedly by telephone, e-mail and Twitter on Tuesday and Wednesday. He responded by e-mail Wednesday afternoon, declining our request for a telephone interview. “I am extremely overwhelmed by the amount of emails, tweets, messages I am getting,” Smeets wrote.
 
He did not immediately respond to a follow-up e-mail inquiring about the apparent discrepancies in his resume and seeking more information about his purported flight.
 
The domains for Smeets’ website, humanbirdwings.net and .com, were both registered in August 2011 through the private domain registration service of Netherlands-based SoHosted, which hides the identity of the domain’s owner.
 
Ron Fedkiw, a computer scientist at Stanford University who has worked on computer-generated graphics in films such as “Terminator 3″ and “Star Wars: Episode III,” told Wired in an email that a continuous video shot might have made Smeets’ latest video “a much more convincing fake.”
 
“[C]utting the camera angle is an obvious trick,” Fedkiw wrote to Wired in an email. “Note how there is no continuous video from take-off to landing, instead they cut away the main ground camera right as he takes off and cut back right before he lands.”
 
“They don’t really even need much CGI work or any fake footage here with the camera cuts,” he wrote. “The head cam footage could all be shot from a glider video — any glider, not necessarily those wings … The only real image work would have to be in the very beginning when they get a small bit off the ground, which could just be running up an edited hill or ramp.”
 
Bert Otten, a neuromechanics scientist at the University of Groningen, met with Smeets and his colleagues in August 2011.
 
“I haven’t seen the contraption they have built with my own eyes, so I cannot tell you from the inside whether this is fake or not,” Otten told Wired. “I haven’t looked at the video very carefully, but others have, and I must share their suspicions there.”
 
Gizmodo offers some of its own analysis from CGI experts, who point to several other incongruities in the video. A small black square suddenly appears on the right wing just before Smarno takes off, suggesting a real model was switched out for a CG one. In addition, shadows cast by Smeets’ accomplices on his wings don’t match up to the movements of the people themselves.
 
Another video on the Flying High website contains screenshots of the prototype made in a program called Maya, primarily used by 3-D artists. While not proof of doctoring, it is suggestive that the team could have created a fake flying machine in their computer.

[javajolt]

As the saying goes: if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Surprise! The video of a man flying with a mechanically-assistated set of bird wings is a hoax. Not only did Jarno Smeets not actually fly like a bird, his name isn’t even Jarno Smeets. It’s actually Floris Kaayk, a Dutch CGI artist and filmmaker who told a Dutch TV show today that the “Human Bird Wing” project was all part of a documentary he’s making on Internet hoaxes.
 
Suspicion about the video, which has racked up nearly 3 million views on YouTube in under a week, began almost immediately after it went live last weekend. Gizmodo posted the story, followed by Wired, Time, and countless other publications. Commenters on the early stories were convinced it was a fraud, possibly a commercial for GoPro cameras (which the video was shot on), or Nintendo (whose Wii controllers were used in the wings).
 
The skepticism of the public forced publications to look further into the authenticity of the video. A hoard of CGI experts were brought in, almost all of whom concluded the video was created with the help of computer graphics — a well-done fake, but no more real than Star Wars or Avatar.
 
Then, late yesterday, Wired discovered that Jarno Smeets’ LinkedIn profile was entirely fabricated. Coventry University, where he claimed to have received a mechanical engineering degree, had no record of anyone by that name. Nor did either of the companies Smeets listed as his past employers. During his interview with “De Wereld Draait Door” (“The World Keeps Turning”) today, Kaayk (aka Smeets) admitted that he actually “graduated cum laude at the animation department of the St. Joost Academy and received his Master of Fine Arts degree at the Sandberg Institute.”
 
Considering he tricked a slew of reputable publications out there into thinking his stunt was real, we have to give him props for a job well done.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OESwdRb48jM#wsclick the cc button for subtitles

The man who claimed to achieve bird-like flight with a custom-built contraption came clean today: It was a hoax 8 months in the making.

End of story