Animar: Augmenting the Reality of Storyboards and Animations

This paper presents Animar, a mobile application to create short animations that uses augmented reality to aid the sketching. This application was conceived using design methods and its characteristics were used to create the interface and form of interaction. The user draws each frame on a specific paper with empty rectangles and a few patterns. The software extracts the frames and rectifies the perspective distortion using image processing techniques. To help the user, Animar tracks the pattern to show a virtual onion skin of a chosen frame over another one. The animation is generated by combining all the frames extracted from the paper. Animar was developed for Android and supports multiple screen sizes from cell phones to tablets and its concept won an international contest on problem solving with augmented reality.