Disney’s AR Museum App: A Stealth Play for Smart Coloring Books?
Disney has created an augmented reality app called AR Museum that allows users to recolor famous paintings. While the app is initially marketed as a museum tool, there’s a possibility it could be used to breathe new life into millions of old storybooks.
The app segments paintings into color regions, allowing users to recolor them with a touch. This process is far more efficient than manually defining the layers required for recolorization. While the researchers didn’t use machine learning, they were able to decompose the constituent colors of a painting using ordinary weighting methods in just one minute, a tenth of the time it would take an artist to do it manually.
This pre-processing could be applied to all the paintings in a museum, allowing kids to entertain themselves while adults explore other aspects of the museum. However, the real potential of this technology lies in its application to children’s books.
Millions of old storybooks sit on shelves around the world, waiting for a new way to engage kids. Disney could easily train the app to recognize and recolor these books, giving them a new life and potentially creating new AR interactions. This could lead to a renaissance in the world of children’s literature, with books like Bambi on Mars or The Fox and the Dalmation taking on new forms.
While Disney might lose a few sales as kids opt for digital recoloring instead of traditional coloring, they could gain a dedicated cadre of kids who see AR as a natural method of interacting with Disney properties.
