The inventor behind the Human Bird Wings project that took the Internet by storm with a video of a successful human flight has now admitted that the project was an elaborate hoax.

Jarno Smeets -- actually a CGI artist named Floris Kaayk -- revealed on Dutch television program De Wereld Draait Door that he faked the flight as part of a documentary on Internet hoaxes.

Looks like the skeptical animators at Industrial Light and Magic were right: the kite wings were a CGI creation. No word on whether the flapping wing animation was borrowed from The Wizard of Oz, as one ILM employee suggested.

inb4 the Kaayk is a lie.

[gizmodo]

Dutch engineer Jarno Smeets recently took to the sky on a pair of "human bird wings," and released a video of his first successful flight yesterday.

Or did he? According to CGI experts at George Lucas's special effects house, Industrial Light and Magic, the flying Dutchman's maiden voyage was faked.

Various ILM employees point to the low quality of the footage, the apparent lack of head movement from Smeets as he flaps his wings and a suspicious-looking shadow as some of the factors suggesting a hoax. One person even claimed that the animation cycle of the figure in the video was "borrowed from the monkeys in Wizard of Oz."

Despite their evidence, we still don't know for sure that the flight wasn't real. Even the Mythbusters' Jamie Hyneman, while skeptical, thought the physics of Smeets' feat looked plausible.

If it is a fake, though, it's quite the long con. Smeets has been posting updates about his progress on the wings since last July.

[gizmodo]

Jarno Smeets, the Dutch engineer behind the HumanBirdWings project, has finally taken flight on his homemade, Wiimote-controlled wings.

Smeets took to the air for 100 meters worth of flapping and gliding, captured via a helmet-cam and some friends on the ground. He described the experience as "the best feeling I've ever felt" and "a f*cking magical moment."

The system works by sending accelerometer data from two Wiimotes to an Android smartphone, which controls the flapping of the wings, keeping their movements in sync with the pilot's arm movements.

To perfect his angle of attack for takeoff, Smeets studied the way the albatross launches into flight, which turned out to be ideal for the HumanBirdWings' huge wingspan.

It may be quite some time before the project is even safe -- let alone commercially available -- but Smeets' successful test is still a huge leap, flap and glide toward making winged human flight a real possibility.

[techcrunch]