A video has emerged on Twitter showing a faceless yet worryingly realistic humanoid robot walking in what looks like a perfectly mundane courtyard. The trip down the uncanny valley caused some to proclaim an impending apocalypse.
The clip shows the stoop-backed robot making its way past the cameraman, with ominous music playing in the background. Its black and orange limbs, hi-tech-looking protrusions along its spine, and its hollowed out head all lend to the realism, bringing to mind Boston Dynamics' latest scary creations. But then the camera zooms in on its face plate, and that's where you might feel a slight urge to scream and run, because set in the near-featureless white mask are two moving, human-like eyes.
Naturally, some users' reaction was "WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE."
Others launched a salvo of Terminator references.
Still others were not as impressed by seeing their new robot overlord, instead admonishing it for its unhealthy posture.
It all ultimately turned out to be a false alarm: the mechanical monstrosity is just masterfully-done embedded CGI, one of the robots digitally created for ADAM, a series of post-apocalyptic sci-fi short films by director Neill Blomkamp, whose more widely-known creations are Elysium, District 9 and Chappie. ADAM was created with the Unity game engine and intended to showcase how to make high-quality image relatively on a budget. Blomkamp has already created a script for a longer ADAM movie, and was hoping the short films would help him secure funding.
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