A viral video of a human-like robot created a sensation on the internet showing the droid casually walking up a driveway.
This is the real video of a robot, as the hi-tech robot walks with what resembles a human’s gait and, just as it passes the cameraman, gives viewers a closer look at its white-masked face and a pair of black eyes.
Although many social media users reacted as if the clip demonstrated a Terminator-like cyborg were on the loose, the video actually featured a computer-generated character originally created for a series of short films from filmmaker Neill Blomkamp and Oats Studios.
Blomkamp attempted to quell the internet’s fears about a robot uprising and shared the first installment from the “Adam” series:
The clip has viewed five million times and caused many scared Twitter users to warn of the end of days.
The “Adam” films were created with an advanced CGI gaming engine called Unity.
Although this character is certainly most well known for appearing in Blomkamp’s films, it is also a downloadable asset, allowing other filmmakers and video game creators to place it in their own projects.
The viral video of the human-like robot was created by filmmaker and VFX artist Maxim Sullivan and was originally posted to Twitter on 12 August 2018:
‘Although no one would welcome a robot uprising more than I, it’s actually part of this miniseries,’ Blomkamp tweeted while sharing a link to the short film ‘Adam.’
Adam’ is a miniseries that ‘tells the story of a human whose brain has been erased and imprisoned in a robotic shell.’
The series shows a version of the robot shared in the now-viral video.
In response to a question from Gizmodo reporter Matt Novak, Sullivan explained that he filmed the background with his phone and then added the Adam character in a post:
Both of the CGI robots were made using Unity, a game engine that lets creators build realistic-looking graphics for movies, video games and other forms of entertainment, on a relatively low budget and with few complicated tools.
Still, it didn’t stop many Twitter users from thinking Adam was real and believing it to be a sign of the apocalypse.