All kids love grabbing pencils and taking them to coloring books. The tactile act of filling in cartoon character line drawings with color has long proven to have positive repercussions on a child’s motor and perceptual development. Plus, what’s more fun than bringing color to your favourite cartoon characters?
Disney has now notched this activity up by enabling a more engaging experience using the engaging power of augmented reality. They have developed an app that incorporates several new-generation image recognition algorithms which uses a smartphone or tablet’s camera to overlay a 3D version of the character from the coloring book. As a child colors on the page, the system reflects actual pencil strokes on the 3D character in real time.
The system also incorporates spacial tracking, using the image in the book as the marker, It even reflects perspective and movement changes in accordance with the device. The technology developed in this project can even track variations in the curves of a coloring book’s pages to faithfully render the characters during the experience.
The ability to see a character on screen being colored in real time as kids draw on the page is expected to drive kids to taking up drawing, while helping form more lasting associations with the characters.
If you’re keen to geek out on the technicalities behind this project, have at the original research paper here.
See the research in action here:
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