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.

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.



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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