No, this is not a video of a 7D wildlife park in Japan

This article is more than one year old.
Published on October 19, 2018 at 16:00
2 min read
By AFP Pakistan

A viral Facebook video claims to show a 7D theme park in Japan where visitors can touch, feel, and smell digital renderings of animals. Reverse image searches found that the footage was a compilation of advertisement campaigns and other videos featuring augmented reality technology.

This Facebook video, which was posted some two years ago, has received 63 million views and more than 143,500 shares.

It claims: “This is a 7D park in Japan. You can touch, feel and even smell the animals. We are still in 3D and 4D while Japanese are in 7D.”

The video shows people interacting with animals including polar bears, a tiger, rhino and a giant whale.

Screenshot of misleading Facebook post

Reverse image searches found that three of the clips in the video showed augmented reality technology produced by the firm INDE.

The first clip, which shows people interacting with polar bears, can be seen in this video published in January 2013 on YouTube for a campaign for Coca Cola and the World Wildlife Fund that was shot at the Science Museum in London.

The second clip in the sequence was originally shot in Rotterdam, the Netherlands and was published by National Geographic in 2013 as part of an augmented reality display.

The next clip in the video was shot in Hong Kong by INDE in 2015.

Livia Jozsa, Marketing Manager for INDE, told AFP in an email that the first three clips in the Facebook video were made by INDE.

“I can confirm that the first three out of the five clips featured in this video are in fact our large-screen Augmented Reality system, BroadcastAR . The AR experiences, including the 3D content have been fully created by us,” Jozsa said.

“Each of our BroadcastAR experiences featured in the video was installed for a different client, in a different location (London, Rotterdam and Hong Kong) and time, and none of them is in a theme park or in Japan.”

The fourth clip in the video was produced by technology software company Lemon & Orange for an interactive augmented reality campaign in Poland.

“Working for Visa – supplier of payment solutions – Lemon&Orange created one of the largest interactive augmented reality based campaigns in Poland,” the company said in a description of the event posted on VIMEO three years ago.

The last clip in the video shows a giant whale splashing on a basketball court, footage released by the Magic Leap technology company in 2016.

It is a promotional video not an augmented reality experience but the company's founder has said they are working on it.

“Regarding the last one with the whale, it is a Magic Leap teaser video, not an actual AR experience,” Jozsa from INDE added.

Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.

E-mail