Animated Drawings is an open-source project from the Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team at Mela AI. The goal of this project is to help creators and developers create their own drawing-to-animation experiences or products.

At its inception in 2021, FAIR applied recent advancements in computer vision towards an intuitive pipeline in order to animate any human-like figures found in character drawings. 

The demo for Animated Drawings came as a publicly-accessible and web-based tool that allowed users to upload drawings, view/correct model predictions, and receive an animation starring the character in their drawings. 

With the demo, parents also had the option to opt to allow Meta to retain the image and annotations for suture research use. The demo was released with the hopes of collecting 10,000 drawings that could be used to improve model performance.

Today, the open-source version of the Animated Drawings project includes both the models and the code used by the Animated Drawings Demo. 

The company stated that the idea behind the open-sourcing of the project is to enable other developers to create demos and experiences that utilize the animation assets from user drawings. 

This project is also intended to lower the barrier to entry for people who wish to experiment with animation and create their own drawing-to-animation experiences. The release of both the model and code is geared at offering developers a starting point to build on and further extend the project.

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