Sketch Alive

Sketch Alive started with my 4 year old daughter, who loves drawing on hand held sketch toys. I wanted that, with some added animation. You draw on a silver screen, then stop for a moment and your drawing wakes up.

What you can do

• Draw: drag a finger or mouse to draw one connected line, like the toy. Or switch to Freeform to draw with separate strokes, as you would with a stylus.
• Wait: after a moment of stillness the game guesses what you drew: a critter, a person, a plant, or a thing. You can also tap Wake it up!
• Watch: the animation comes from your own line. Critters trot, with legs and tail swinging. People walk and wave. Plants grow and sway. Things hop, and round things roll. Everything gets googly eyes.
• Fix the guess: if the game guessed wrong, tap the right kind and the drawing moves differently.
• Share: the share link carries your drawing, so a friend sees it come alive and can then draw their own.

How it guesses

The guess is a simple rule of thumb, not machine learning. It looks at the shape of the line: how wide it is compared to how tall, how many narrow legs reach down from the bottom, and whether a thin stem holds up a wider top. Many legs and a wide body is a critter, two legs and a narrow head is a person, a stem with a wider top is a plant, and anything else is a thing. It will be wrong sometimes, which is why the buttons are there.

The animation moves each point of your line by where it sits in the drawing. Points near the bottom swing like legs, points at the sides wave like arms or tails, and points near the top sway most for plants. Because it works on the points rather than on named body parts, odd drawings still move.