A fresh Disney Research project can now make coloring books interactive and 3D, by using a special Android and iOS coloring book app, that relies on the Unity game engine. It can take a colored drawing and turn it into an augmented reality object on the screen, as shown below.
It also keeps the original artwork texture and gets colored in real time, as you do it. The app is able to generate portions of the object in the same texture, even if you’re coloring a mere 2D frame. The completion of the work is interesting here, since the app is able to figure out how to draw the back side of an elephant only by seeing the front side.
The app does this trick by copying pixels from your piece and adapting them to use on other regions. The drawing also gets transformed into a 3D object in real time, so there’ no delay while coloring. Imagine this turning into a whole interactive coloring book game, with stories to match. Right now the app is not available for download, or the coloring book for sale, but the project is progressing nicely.
