Meta releases AI tool that can animate drawings

(Image: Meta)

The Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team at Meta has released a tool called 'Animated Drawings' that can take your sketches and animate them.

The project has been open-sourced and comes with a dataset of 180,000 sketches and doodles that were used to train the AI tool.

FAIR says they used a variety of techniques to make this possible, such as object detection, pose estimation and image processing segmentations.

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To train the models involved, Meta created a homepage with a web-based version of the tool and invited creators to upload their drawings and let the tool animate them. The creators could also provide consent to Meta that lets them use their drawings to train the AI models.

FAIR said the response to the demo was overwhelming, with over 1.6 million submissions received.

What was interesting is the fact that many of the images uploaded weren't drawings at all. Users uploaded various pictures of "company logos, stuffed animals, anime characters, pets, action figures, and a variety of other things that people wanted to animate."

Despite the tool mentioning support for only human figures, people tried their hands at animating other forms like "quadrupeds, birds, fishes and many other forms".

Meta said the users also wanted a "more comprehensive tool" along with other features such as "transparent backgrounds, support for different skeleton types, multiple interacting characters, sound effects, background scenery, and text overlays".

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"Rather than extend the demo to support all the new feature requests, the researchers decided instead to release an open-sourced version of the models and code used by the Animated Drawings Demo," said the FAIR team in a post.

The hope is that developers will use this framework to create more unique experiences. Meta says the tool will " lower the barrier to entry for people who want to experiment with animation and create their own drawing-to-animation experiences."