Making Up Fake News with AR

As the world grows crazier by the day, Augmented Reality provides some much-needed comic relief.

Augmented reality is the “Rising Star” medium of our age, claims Liat Sade-Sternberg, CEO of fuse.it. And it’s hard to argue with that while watching a demo of a guy dancing gangnam style along with disturbingly agile avatars of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. We definitely live in strange times.

You can argue about whether or not that’s a good thing, but in this age of fake news and memes, the fact that this content doesn’t look too polished takes a back seat to whether you can do something fun and creative with it — and share it with one tap.

And that’s just the sort of use case that Sade-Sternberg is selling. Fuse.it is an AR app that lets you sync up multiple audio sources with video at the same time as interacting with a range of 3D animated characters including Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton.

You can insert yourself into memes and news clips, having “conversations” with media personalities, singing and dancing with your favourite (or least favourite) politician, and basically blend, colour, manipulate and mash up any video source to create viral clips ready to share.

Using the app (which has just been released on iOS) is a matter of selecting a character or video you want to…