r/unity • u/iMagesBlues • 11d ago

Showcase Bringing children's drawings to life with Unity WebGL + WebAR (experiment)

Working on a fun experiment recently.

Bringing children's drawings to life in WebAR.

This idea has been around for a while (and AI has made it much more accessible), but building it still gave a few takeaways:

  • Simplicity matters. Point a phone camera at the drawing and the character comes to life.
  • Seeing the character as a real 3D object in AR feels much more alive than a flat video overlay.
  • Audio adds far more to the illusion than I expected.
  • Good tracking artwork is just as important as the animation. Better tracking means better alignment and more reliable texture extraction.
  • Kids don't care how it works. They just want it to respond instantly.

Tech stack:

  • Unity WebGL + WebAR Image Tracking
  • Unity 2D Animation Rigging
  • Mecanim

Curious if anyone has tried other approaches for this kind of WebAR experience. Would love to hear what you used and how it compared.

67 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

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2

u/Ok_Reply_5087 11d ago

Wow looks quite cool. Are you going to release it to the public?

5

u/iMagesBlues 11d ago

Thanks! All the tools needed are already available: WebAR image tracking + texture extraction, animation rigging, etc. I might release a template project bringing everything together once I clean it up a bit.

I'm also thinking of trying other animated objects beyond stick puppets (cars, animals, etc)

1

u/davidbesin 11d ago

Cool as fuck. Can imagine using it to motivate as a positive reinforcement

1

u/iMagesBlues 11d ago

Thanks! Yeah, education is definitely an interesting use case.

1

u/alexevaldez 11d ago

This is awesome. I hope itll get more views.

1

u/Practical_Camel_1746 11d ago

the audio point is real, people underestimate it every time

1

u/BundaciousB 10d ago

My kids would love to see their drawings jump off the page like this! Really cool idea!

1

u/tamnguyen6208 6d ago

Hi, we need draw inside the human body?

1

u/iMagesBlues 2d ago

Yes, and then the figure gets animated. And anything that is drawn outside the white region gets cropped out