Bring your offspring’s masterpiece to life? It is now possible. Meta (formerly Facebook), has just put online a new tool called Animated Drawings, which, as the name suggests, brings your children’s drawings to life.
The free application can be accessed from any web browser. Thanks to an artificial intelligence created by the researchers at Meta, it is possible to bring to life and animate any drawing frozen on paper. In a post on Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg himself uploaded a video demonstration of the tool, using a drawing made by his daughter.
And it is clear that the result is stunning and would make any animation designer pale, especially since the tool automates almost the entire process. For the AI to work and animate the drawing, it must however meet certain very specific criteria: it must be drawn on a white (or clear) sheet without lines, the photo of the drawing must be well lit and without shadows, and must not contain any personal information, offensive content or element violating the intellectual property of a third party.
Facebook uploaded a demo page allowing everyone to test the application. You will first need to accept cookies before you can access the photo upload window or the scan of your child’s drawing.
You must then accept the terms of use, ensure that the character’s limbs are correctly detected by the AI (and if not add them manually) and finally define the location of the limbs and joints of the character shown in the drawing. .
The magic of Artificial Intelligence then operates and allows you to see the character drawn by your child come to life in several distinct animations that must be generated each time.
The mini-videos generated by the platform can then be shared or saved by right-clicking on the animation displayed in full screen.