Disney Research App Turns Coloring Book Drawings Into 3D Objects on Screen That Retain the Artwork’s Texture

Disney Research has developed a fascinating augmented reality coloring book app that turns coloring book drawings into 3D objects on screen that also manage to retain the original artwork’s texture. Disney Research also supplied an informative PDF document, available to download online, that goes into more detail on how their incredible app works.

Augmented reality holds unique potential to impact this situation by providing a bridge between real-world activities and digital enhancements. In this paper, we present an augmented reality coloring book App in which children color characters in a printed coloring book and inspect their work using a mobile device. The drawing is detected and tracked, and the video stream is augmented with an animated 3-D version of the character that is textured according to the child’s coloring. This is possible thanks to several novel technical contributions. We present a texturing process that applies the captured texture from a 2-D colored drawing to both the visible and occluded regions of a 3-D character in real time. (read more)

images via Disney Research