What a time to be alive! The humble coloring book is getting a high-tech makeover for the 21st century thanks to the folks at Disney Research, who have developed an augmented reality app that can turn a child’s artwork into a 3D character – and while it’s still being colored, no less!
According to Engadget and Gizmodo, the application was built using the Unity game engine. It tracks and captures real-time images from the camera on a smartphone or tablet, then maps them onto any 3D deformable surface, retaining the original texture of the artwork in the process.
While your child (or you – we don’t judge here at redOrbit) color in a 2D picture, the character created by the AR app moves around and is slowly colored in, and since it’s impossible to color a picture in 3D, the software itself fills in the rest in a style that resembles the user’s work.
In footage released by Disney Research, the app is shown in action as an artist colors in a picture of an elephant while a 3D, AR version of the creature dances on top of the drawing on the mobile device. As the creature’s pants are colored, the changes appear on the virtual version as well.
Now for the bad news…
Unfortunately, the technology is not yet commercially available. The app is still in the research phase, according to Gizmodo, so it cannot be downloaded just yet, and there is no word on just how long it might be before this technology finds its way into our hands. Gimme!
In the meantime, Engadget is hopeful that the technology will be tweaked and adapted for use in other applications, such as for characters in interactive video games. Earlier this year, the website ran a report discussing Disney’s desire to make video games more interactive, including using the actions of the player to create truly open-world gaming with free-form narrative experiences.
For example, imagine there was a scene where two bears were supposed to have a beach ball, but the person playing the game removed the prop from that part of the game. In that case, one of the bears would ask the player for a ball so that the story could proceed as normal. The player would then have to decide whether to just give them a ball, create a beach ball shop, or withhold it.
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Feature Image: Disney Research
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