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This article was published on October 3, 2015

Researchers use AR to bring your coloring book to 3D


Researchers use AR to bring your coloring book to 3D

Coloring is cool. There, I said it! Whether you’re eight or eighty years old, there’s always a delightful zen that can be achieved when you take out some crayons and flex your creativity in a coloring book.

The folks at Disney Research have captured that zen and added a little extra whimsy to it — creating quite the technical feat in the process. In a paper released today, a group of researchers have developed a way to take advantage of Augmented Reality and turn a 2D coloring experience into a 3D one.

3DColoring Book

The app actually captures the texture of the object in real-time, allowing the unique color patterns on the page to be accurately displayed on a 3D model. Those models actually move around with pages, and have special animations to bring life to them.

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3dColoringBook3

The researchers created a static lookup map to assign pixels to the area of the photo, so when you color on the drawing, the model updates over time. There’s also a deformable surface tracking algorithm, allowing the app to compensate for the movement and bending of the page.

Watch the video here:

Unsurprisingly, users who tested the app were thrilled with the results. Who wouldn’t be? Coloring is fun, but adding an extra tech layer really gets the giddy child-like excitement coursing through your veins.

I’ll take 20.

Disney Research

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