Over the years so many Technology related April fools have been done that look extremely believable and will come as a real shock once you find out that you have been fooled. Here is a collection of five good ones.
1. Virgin’s Glass-Bottomed Plane
Richard Branson amps up his air empire with this amazing declaration where his planes will have glass bottoms to allow travellers to gaze into the clouds and the civilization below.
He says,
“We hope to trial the glass bottom technology with other Virgin airlines in time and have asked other Virgin companies to support this innovative trial and launch our new domestic Scottish route. This really is a team effort from all corners of Virgin.”
2. Google Maps Treasure Mode
Google Maps wants to bring your Goonies dreams to life:
Archeological analysis has confirmed that our Google Maps Street View team has indeed found one of history’s long lost relics: a treasure map belonging to the infamous pirate, William “Captain” Kidd.
The map was found on a recent expedition in the Indian Ocean, as part of a deep-water dive to expand our underwater Street View collection. Captain Kidd was rumored to have buried his treasure around the world, and tales of a long-lost treasure map have lingered for generations.
Watch this video and it will look real as anything.
3. Google PigeonRank
Here is the explanation where Google uses live pigeons to rank search results.
PigeonRank’s success relies primarily on the superior trainability of the domestic pigeon (Columba livia) and its unique capacity to recognize objects regardless of spatial orientation. The common gray pigeon can easily distinguish among items displaying only the minutest differences, an ability that enables it to select relevant web sites from among thousands of similar pages.
By collecting flocks of pigeons in dense clusters, Google is able to process search queries at speeds superior to traditional search engines, which typically rely on birds of prey, brooding hens or slow-moving waterfowl to do their relevance rankings.
When a search query is submitted to Google, it is routed to a data coop where monitors flash result pages at blazing speeds. When a relevant result is observed by one of the pigeons in the cluster, it strikes a rubber-coated steel bar with its beak, which assigns the page a PigeonRank value of one. For each peck, the PigeonRank increases. Those pages receiving the most pecks, are returned at the top of the user’s results page with the other results displayed in pecking order.
Google’s reliability fooled everyone but this was all an April Fools trick.
4. Download your brain onto a 2GB memory stick
IWOOT were still having fun designing crazy products back in 2006, when they released the Memory Stick that lets you download your thoughts onto a 2GB flash drive.
The idea was you could back up all your thoughts onto your PC to stop you forgetting them in your old age… the only problem was you would probably lose the stick as soon as you’d finished. Or not, seeing as it was fictional, but we’re always on the lookout for practical problems.
5. Opera: Face gesture browsing (2009)
Browsing underdog Opera sprang face-gestures on the world in 2009. We were told it was possible to navigate the web via a series of elaborate expressions, but it warned that “users visiting sites that contain adult content sometimes make unconscious facial expressions”.
Source: various websites