Meta has launched a new artificial intelligence project that allows users to turn their simple drawings into animated shapes. The social media giant has put the “Animated Drawings” project in the public domain, hoping developers will use code and data to create unusual doodles.
The Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team first presented the project in 2021 as a web-based tool. The user uploads a drawing of a single human figure, selects a demonstration shape from a set, and then resizes the capture field around the picture. The service uses object detection models, posture estimation, and image-processing segmentation techniques to create an animated version of the image.
The animated figure can be further customized by making it dance, walk, run, and laugh. Users are free to upload their drawings, but they must consent to Meta using them to train their models.
Meta said that users consented to use more than 1.6 million images for educational purposes within months of launching the demo. This prompted the company to release an open-source project with a dataset of about 180,000 drawings.
