Flippy

Bring doodles to life in AR

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Inspiration

When we were kids one of our fantasies was to live in a world where paper had moving images like the newspapers in Harry Potter. We think AR can be a solid first step towards making that vision a reality for kids growing up in the age of smartphones. We wanted to make an app that's easy to use, whimsical, fun, get's people using pen and paper.

What it does

User draws a grid on a piece of white paper, draws the frames of an animation in the grid squares, points their phone at it and taps on the grid like they're trying to set the camera's auto focus. Flippy captures a picture of their drawing, flattens it for them (so they don't have to hold the phone too carefully), slices up the frames, and makes them into an animation which is displayed through AR onto the surface they drew on.

How we built it

We built the back end in python and created a server to send information back and forth from EchoAR to our script. We use open computer computer vision to automatically detect the paper in frame, do perspective correction to flatten the drawing, and crop to the animation frame region. This is then sliced up and converted to a video file animation.

Challenges we ran into

Our inability to contact EchoAR for the majority of the hackathon period meant we were struggling with a framework that wasn't enabled for use in the hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud to have made a proof of concept that's genuinely fun to use. We started laughing childishly once our dumb animations started coming together.

What we learned

We learned that AR has exciting potential and isn't as prohibitively hard to work with as we initially thought.

What's next for Flippy

We see this app being recoded properly to work inside unity, being tested to accommodate as many use cases as possible so kids can use it without too much trouble, and having a share feature implemented. The goal is to have an easy to use app that inspires kids and adults like us to draw more, giving us an outlet to share our creations in a new way. Long term we can imagine implementing social media content platform features like customizable profiles and a discover page like the 'for you' page on tik tok where users can explore the creations of the Flippy community.

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