Disney “3D Coloring Books” App is Awesome

Disney Research recently unveiled a coloring book app that can give 2-D characters in the book a 3-D form while the child is still coloring them.

Based on the child’s colouring, the app fills in colours in real-time on an animated 3D version of the elephant that is visible on the device’s screen and integrated into the video. The process is far from flawless but it is still impressive.

The app is still in the research phases so don’t expect to see it available for download or work with colouring books you can buy at the Disney Store just yet.

In user testing – performed with adults rather than children in this early study – the researchers found that most users said the app increased their motivation to draw in colouring books and 80 percent said the app increased their feeling of connection to a character.

The app was first unveiled in Japan at the IEEE global Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2015).

The work also fits in Disney’s larger initiative named Augmented Creativity that focuses on the use of AR for enhancing creative play. The app can automatically detect which character the user is coloring and display it automatically.

Robert W. Sumner, a research scientist at Disney, says that AR holds a lot of potential in connecting the gap between digital experience and activities in the real world.

Essentially, the app will track 2D coloring, on paper, using your tablet camera.

Be Careful: Soon your children will steal your tablet to run the new Disney 3D Coloring Books app! Eventually, researchers had the idea of creating a “lookup map” that matches pixels from the back to those provided by the user.