Fact Check: German village shaped like a human fingerprint ? Find out the Truth..

Photos showing breathtaking landscapes and sceneries often go viral on social media. These images are widely admired by social media users and is one of the reason why these images get so much traction. However, many a times the context of the image turns out to be wrong or the image turns out to be unreal. We recently noticed one such fascinating image going viral among Facebook users. It was claimed that this photo is an aerial view of German village that looks exactly like a human fingerprint from the sky.

However, when Fact Crescendo Sri Lanka did verification of the photo, it turned out that the photo was not real. Let’s dive into the details of the claims made regarding the image and how we found out its truth.

What is the claim?

A Facebook User called ONLY nature shared an image, alongside the caption “This is a German village shaped like fingerprint” on 12^th of July 2021 (12.07.2021) as seen in the screenshot below.

Facebook Link | Archived Link

Few other Facebook users and pages shared the same image with similar narrations.

Fact Check

First, we ran a Google Reverse Image search on the image shared with the claim and found this image had featured on the cover of February 2015 edition of MODUS magazine.

issuu.com | Archived link

We found more images showing the creation of this “fingerprint city” on Behance Page called YIPPIEHEY Studio with the caption ‘Human Touch Modus Cover’.

Here, the creator YIPPIEHEY Studio mentions that for the February 2015 issue of Modus Magazine he was asked to create a satellite picture kind of artwork showing a fingerprint shaped city to illustrate “the human touch.” He also says that “Experimenting with cloner objects and dynamic texturing it was a great challenge to figure out the best way to create a crowded place like a city.”

behance.net| Archived link

We also noticed that YIPPIEHEY Studio Profile belonged to a German designer and illustrator named Jacob Eisinger who specializes in 3D illustration.

behance.net

Here is an Instagram post by YIPPIEHEY studio about his illustration back in 2017.

We did a keyword search to find out whether there was actually any village shaped in the form of human fingerprint, which did not yield any results.

This image alongside the claim has been making rounds on social media over the year and below is a video from ABC 10 News confirming the same.

Conclusion:

From our investigation, it is clear that the image claimed to be an aerial image of a German city resembling a human fingerprint is neither a real photograph nor an accurate visual depiction of a real village in Germany. The image is a digital creation by an artist called Jacob Eisinger, which featured in the MODUS magazine cover in February 2015.