Basically, this guy modified his cellphone case with propellers to take selfies

Which is awesome my only issue with it is that it's not only fake, but it's a scam which I'll explain in a minute

but as for being fake

The first clue is that these are three volts seven millimeter micro brush motors like you see here if you attach one to a beam

Like this and turn it on at full throttle you'll see the most weight that it can lift is six quarters or about thirty grams.

The cell phone in the video with all the flying gear attached would weigh about 300 grams

and since drones are typically designed to hover at 70% max thrust you would need at least

15 of these motors to do what he did, but you know, this just doesn't look as catchy

In fact, we recreated the exact setup

he used in the video and turn the motors to full throttle and this is what happened here.

Here it is in slow mo and as you can see there's hardly any difference than if you don't turn the propellers on at all

so I'm gonna show you how this scam artist somehow manages to break the laws of physics four more times in this three-minute video and

then because obeying laws of physics isn't optional

we're gonna call a fellow youtuber Captain Disillusion to see if he can help us spot any signs of a special effects. And then

with my buddy Peter Sripol i'm going to show you what it would take to

Actually build a flying selfie phone case and then i'll put all the details on a new set. I built using wix.com.

But, before I do any of that

let me first explain why this is a scam and not just a harmless fake video for meaningless internet points. With this many views and

An astounding 80% like ratio, which means most people probably didn't realize it was fake

It's a statistical certainty that some young aspiring engineer

actually tried to build this themselves

worse than their parents phone dropping like a rock and breaking

this might have been his or her first experience at making something. But, how you might ask would they know what components to use well?

here in the description amazing maker was kind enough to put links Amazon affiliate links

you can tell by the URLs.

So he is making money off the crushed dreams of aspiring engineers without enough experience yet to this is total BS and aspiring engineers

are my people, and you don't mess with my people.

Let's do this

the second gratuitous violation of physics comes in this scene the force of gravity always points down but helicopter spinning blades create a force perpendicular

to the blades themselves

so if you want to hover you need to be level so the forces will cancel out and you won't move if you tilt forward

and then break the thrust force into its x and y components

you suddenly have an unbalanced force that will move you in that direction in essence

that's how helicopters move forward by tipping forward in other words

It's physically impossible to hover in an orientation like this

The forward thrust component is unbalanced and it would have to move the phone forward

The third major issue is the Arduino compatible circuit board

he chose. It's the same board here and it's supposed to be the brains for the drone

yet, this specific model of board doesn't come with any sort of gyroscope or accelerometer.

Here's why that matters if you've ever tried,

balancing something on your hand like this you and your body we're creating what's referred to as a closed-loop feedback control system.

So if it starts to tip over my eyes relay that to my brain and my hand says hey

I'm no longer fuelling the weight just up and down

it's also pushing my hand this way and so my brain takes all that information and

responds by telling my hand to move this way at a specific speed in order to compensate.

So, to keep this thing balanced there's this continuous loop of quickly gathering information and then making real-time adjustments and closed feedback

loops are used all over in engineering from the simple case of a thermostat that

continuously checks the air and turns on at a certain temperature to

dart boards that update their position 200 times a second to get a bull's-eye every time

to machines that are abused and most certainly for anything that flies and needs to stay in the air the fact that his board is

missing a gyroscope and an accelerometer

means there's no way for it to tell if it's starting to rotate or to fall in any direction

It's the equivalent of trying to balance the board wearing a blindfold and an oven mitt

you have no idea what adjustments to make to keep things balanced. Which is the perfect lead-in to the fourth major physics

Flaw notice how he attaches these motors and rigidly fixes them to the phone double-stick tape

this means if you start to tip forward

you have no way to self-correct the phone

orientation and it would just turn into a nosedive, if you only have two propellers in this configuration

they both need to be able to rotate with respect to the phone in order to correct the movements in all six degrees of freedom

for example if it starts to tip forward

you could rotate them both back like this

to correct for that. Or if the wind is trying to spin the phone this way they could assume this configuration to

counter that to return to our balancing shovel analogy by fixing the motors directly to the case

you lose your ability to even make corrections

so not only do you have no idea where to move, but your arm is locked out for making adjustments anyways

which makes it literally impossible to balance.

Owwww.

My final physics issue with this video is one of acoustics

this guy proposes using it as a hands-free way to watch your favorite super hip music videos

conveniently dubbing over the audio here

for reference this is what an episode of the office would sound like on a phone at full volume

and don't forget that you would actually need 13 more motors than this so it would be at least six times louder. [Extremely Loud Whirling Sound]

So now that we thoroughly established a multitude of physical laws have been broken.

Let's find out exactly how he faked it and to do that

I've arranged video call with the undisputed heavyweight champion of the bunking fake videos using special effects Captain disillusion

Be sure to get it as flush as possible against your skin to minimize folds that might make it hard to

chroma key out like this

nice and tight

Captain oh hi Mart Mart robber you weren't supposed to call yet. It's 2 o'clock

I'm actually even 5 minutes late, really.

Well then.

How can I help you

did you not even watch the video I sent

ah, yes, of course the mobile drone video

I've analysed that thoroughly mark and my conclusion is it's totally real

Seriously, yes

Everything except for the mobile drone part, that's fake

if you look very

closely

You might just be able to make out the huge

chattering mask on the side of the phone

Visible in every shot of it flying the creator must have been in a real hurry because it's so messy here

it cuts off the edge of the phone here the tip of his finger and here it reveals the thing

it's supposed to be hiding a rod. It's narrow and light-colored and probably attached with the same mounting tape

He used to tack on all the other gadgets

That's why he's able to grab and adjust the phone in this shot by the river the mask hides not just the stick

But the whole person holding it look closer on this site the real-time

Water and on this side a still frame from an empty version of the shot

And if we track the phone's position and rotation we can easily

Reverse-engineer exactly how the stick puppeteer did rotating mostly from the point where it was held

Wow

That was very impressive captain D

Thank you for taking the time favorite part of this whole thing is the audio

The tiny propellers must have made so little noise at a distance. It didn't give a proper drone vibe

So the hoaxers recorded the sound of the motors up close and reused the same clip in every scene

complete with their muttering voices in the background

[Whirling Noise and Muffled Voices]

Awesome well, thanks again.

But, even though impressive is the number of posts messages and tweets

Presumably from people with functioning eyeballs asking me if this painfully obvious edit is real over and over.

Okay, captain will take care. I've got to go back to my even you mark how could you do this to me?

How could you do?

He's such a joker. So let's fake and now you know

exactly all the reasons why but still a really interesting idea and I was curious what it would look like if you actually

built one of these at using less special effects and more practical engineering.

So, naturally I called in my buddy Peter Shree people whose qualifications

Include building his own electric flame from scratch and he immediately got to work.

Turns out if you take two brushless motors to electronic motor speed controllers a flight controller that actually has a gyroscope and an accelerometer

Integrated a 3d printed frame and two servos to articulate the rotors a radio

transmitter for remote control and a force the lipo battery and then you put them all together it actually works.

Kind of we had to do a bunch of test flights to calibrate that

Feedback control loop we talked about before

so if we notice the drone is either under

compensating or over compensating when it starts to fall in a certain way

we tweak the response

sensitivity in between flights until we get to the sweet spot and I should mention remember how the motors from the fake video could barely

Lift only six quarters. Well, if you properly sized them for the task at hand, they should be able to lift 150 quarters.

And so once we felt like we had it in pretty good shape. We took her out for the maiden test flight

[Music Plays]

They in our defense it was a little windy out there

but as you can see, it can be pretty wobbly at times the truth is a bike copter like this totally works

it just isn't a great design choice.

The reason pretty much all camera drones are quad copters is because they're much more stable due to a larger footprint shared between four motors

and by getting clever with the throttle speeds you can move in all six degrees of freedom with no moving parts

So there you go with solid engineering. You don't need hidden rods or masking and rotoscoping and Sir Isaac Newton can once again

comfortably rest in his grave. So, the moral of the story is just don't cheat and lie in scam

I actually considered going a little easier on Amazing Maker

but then I happen to scan some of his other videos like this knee brace that

Charges your phone and even powers this flashlight as you walk in theory

I'll skip the details

but in reality this system would also never work as shown which is why if you whine that and stabilize on his hand in the

pocket you see him click a hidden flash light switch.

[Boom]

If you want to build a flying selfie foam case yourself

you can watch the video Peter made with all the juicy details. You can find that on his channel or new website

I created called mark rover build instructions.com, and on that site and

you'll actually see build instructions for tons of different projects from my channel, which was made possible by the fine folks at wix.com

I wanted something simple and classy and I almost feel a little guilty

I can make something dysfunctional and it only took about an hour in part. Thanks to a series of questions

you answer when you get started

that means right off the bat

you're close to what you want,

but you can still customize it as much as you like from there

including lining it with one of the hundreds of templates they have and my website is just a simple way to communicate information

but you can make one for your personal brand or your

portfolio, or maybe a new website for your business to sell stuff, or even book appointments right there. And it's free to sign up to

start designing and publishing and it's honestly a lot of fun.

So, to flex your creative muscles for the whole world to see go to wix.com

Slash go slash mark rover or use the link of the video description to get started

Thanks for watching