Tag: augmented reality coloring book

Arnimate augmented reality coloring book lets characters come alive

This new technology allows a child to be able to color in the traditional way, but with a high tech twist.

The use of coloring books is something that children have been enjoying for generations, but today’s kids are used to having a digital spin to everything they do and augmented reality is about to help them with that.

A.R. technology is now making it possible for newly colored characters to come alive on device screens.

This isn’t just a matter of having the animated pictures move about the screen. The augmented reality technology used by Arnimate has made it possible for the characters to appear in three dimensions, appear to move about the real world when viewed through the device screen, and will even respond to being “touched” by kids who are playing with them. This is certain to create a new sense of wonder for children who had previously found coloring to be a game that was limited to choosing the shades and trying to stay within the lines.

The augmented reality coloring book experience from Arnimate is meant to be fully immersive for kids.

Every page in the brand’s coloring book products produces a different scene. When viewed through the mobile app, it becomes possible to bring the complete creation to life. The three dimensional characters and scene will start to appear in real time through the device screen. They will move about in front of the child (or adult). The entire scene and all the characters within it will appear in the colors that were selected by the person who filled them in.

The characters within the scenes are all touch responsive which means that they will interact with the mobile device user through the screen when viewed through the app. Each of the scenes can be viewed from different vantage points.

According to the Kickstarter campaign that was launched by Arnimate, “This way, page after page, children will create their own world. They will meet new characters and play fun and educational games, which will undoubtedly develop creative thinking and install thirst for learning new things.”

Every augmented reality coloring book comes with 12 different scenes that are fully interactive through the app. When they are all completed, they make it possible for the user to play a complete game with the main character. It also comes with sound effects and background music that allow a child to essentially create their own full video game.

Coloring books get an augmented reality face lift from researchers

This traditional activity for children can now bring on a 3D experience through mobile devices.

There isn’t anything new about having a child sit down with a box of crayons to bring a color to a black and white image in a coloring book, but researchers have now added augmented reality to the experience that could allow kids to see a three dimensional version of their projects through the screens of smartphones or tablets.

With the right AR app, the drawing is monitored and a child can enjoy an enhanced experience from the activity.

For example, if a child were to fill in a coloring book image of an elephant, just as he or she usually would, the augmented reality would make it possible for the colors to be filled in on a tablet or smartphone screen in real-time and can bring an animated, 3D version of that elephant to life on the device screen. That animation is then integrated into the video that the child can watch.

The augmented reality app maintains its core focus on the typical coloring activity while enhancing what is viewed.

Augmented Reality - Image of Coloring PencilsOn top of the image the child is coloring, it creates an AR overlay on top of reality that enhances the engagement between the child and the image being colored. The preliminary user testing conducted by researchers was conducted with adults instead of children. What they determined was the majority of users said that their motivation for drawing within the coloring books was increased through the use of the app. In fact 80 percent of the participants in this study said that using the mobile app increased the connection that they felt with a character in the book.

The researchers were from ETH Zurich, the EPFL university in Switzerland, and from Disney. They made a presentation of this new AR technology based experience in Fukuoka, Japan, at the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2015).

While the research is currently being shared primarily within scientific circles, it has already made its way through the tech transfer process, which has already brought to life the Disney Publishing Worldwide and Bendon partnership augmented reality product that was launched earlier in 2015, called “Disney Color and Play”.