Meta Platforms Inc. said today it’s open-sourcing an artificial intelligence-based animation tool that anyone can use to bring their drawings or photos to life.

By making Animated Drawings open source, Meta hopes that other developers will be able to build on it and create richer experiences. The service debuted as a free, web-based tool in 2021.

Created by Meta’s Fundamental AI Research team, it asks users to upload a photo or drawing of a human-like character, or else choose from a demo figure. Those who upload their own image will then be required to agree that Meta can use the drawing to train its AI models.

Once the image is uploaded, the first task is to resize the capture box so it fits around the character or person snugly. Next, the user must use simple pen and eraser tools to tweak the outline of the picture, so the tool knows where the head, arms and legs are.

After that, a second simple tool can be used to highlight where the character’s joints are. Once that’s done, users click “next” and the tool will reveal an animated version of the character, with users the ability to switch between various categories — dance, funny, jumping and walking.

In a blog post, Meta’s FAIR team explained that Animated Drawings is built using object detection, pose estimation and image processing-based segmentation models that work together to capture a digital version of an image. After that, it deforms and animates the image using traditional computer graphic techniques.

So far, users have uploaded more than 1.6 million images to the free, web-based tool, Meta said. Despite Meta saying that only human figures will work, users have uploaded images of everything from stuffed animals to fish, company logos and anime characters.

Meta said it also received a bunch of requests from users for more in-depth tools, including the ability to add sound effects and text overlays. With such broad interest in Animated Drawings, Meta ultimately decided to open-source the tool along with a dataset of around 180,000 drawings, so developers can create more extensive drawing-to-animation experiences.

“Drawing is a natural and expressive modality that is accessible to most of the world’s population,” Meta’s AI researchers said. “We hope our work will make it easier for other researchers to explore tools and techniques specifically tailored to using AI to complement human creativity.”

Image: Meta Platforms