Colour an elephant and see it come alive!

Based on the child’s coloring, the app fills in colors in real-time on an animated 3D version of the elephant that is visible on the device’s screen and integrated into the video.

A new app developed by Disney utilizes the technological advancement of augmented reality to make their coloring books pop-up to life in three dimensional interface.

The app was first unveiled in Japan at the IEEE worldwide Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2015). Surely, this news is something to look forward to but as of now, it is still in the research phase, but once its ready for release, it will be definitely be a hit with the public because who doesn’t want to produce artwork a la Disney, right?

A child will color the character in the coloring book normally while the tablet or smartphone running with the app will monitor the drawing.

Disney Research also reports that their team aims to influence the next generation of childhood imaginations by sparking creativity by combining traditional coloring activity with digital enhancements. Working backwards through dimensions, the researchers created animated 3D virtual characters, which were then transformed into 2D line-art presentations for the coloring book.

As the child progresses with coloring, the app uses the same colors on the 3-D model.

Because the colouring occurs in real-time, the illusion is created that the user is also colouring the occluded areas, with similar texturing of the colour.

The process is much harder than it sounds: The researchers must take into account different angles of the image-color on the front of a face will be different from the back of a head. It does this by applying pixels from the drawing to every piece of a lookup map.