Meta’s new AI project turns doodles into animated figures

Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, has released an artificial intelligence project called Animated Drawings as open-source. This project allows anyone to turn their doodles into animated figures with the help of AI. Meta's intention in making Animated Drawings an open-source project is to enable other developers to innovate and provide users with more diverse and immersive experiences.

Originally released by the Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team in 2021, the web-based version of Animated Drawings requires users to upload a drawing of a single human-like character or choose a demo figure. 

Users who upload their own doodles are given the option to provide consent to Meta for using their drawing to train its models through a presented consent form. However, it is not mandatory to give consent in order to use the tool.

After uploading a drawing, the user must resise a capture box to fit snugly around the creation. Then it offers a pen and eraser to make any necessary adjustments before adjusting the joint placements. 

Once completed, the tool generates an animated version of the sketch. Users can then select from a variety of pre-set animations from four categories, which include dance, funny, jumping, and walking.

Animated Drawings utilise various techniques, such as object detection models, pose estimation models, and image processing-based segmentation methods, to digitally capture a drawing. It then utilises traditional computer graphics techniques to deform and animate the image.

Within months of the demo's release, users granted Meta permission to use more than 1.6 million images for training purposes, including images of company logos, anime characters, fish, and stuffed animals, despite the tool stipulating that only human figures would work. 

The tool's popularity and the variety of images uploaded prompted requests for a more comprehensive toolset, including sound effects and text overlays, suggesting a broad interest in more extensive drawing-to-animation experiences. As a result, Meta decided to release the project as an open-source tool along with a dataset comprising approximately 180,000 drawings.

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