The team at Retro, a photo-sharing app for close friends and family, is experimenting with how genetic AI can be put to more creative uses. To test the latest, cutting-edge AI technologies, the team built a new app called Splatthat lets you turn any photo into a coloring book page for kids.
As any parent will tell you, kids love to color. And thanks to the web, there are a seemingly infinite number of coloring book pages available to print at home.
However, many of the sites that host these pages are filled with ads and other clutter, making them difficult to navigate. Other times, the printables are only available for a small fee, which some parents don’t want to pay, given the use of a lot of children’s scribbled artwork.
This inspired the Retro team to develop an app for printing coloring book pages at home — either from your own photos or from the ones it provides in kid-friendly, educational categories like animals, space, flowers, fairy tales, robots, cars, and more.
To get started with Splat, you’ll take a photo or select a photo from your Camera Roll. Then you can choose which style of photo you want to color — such as anime, 3D movie, manga, cartoon, or comic book. The app will then turn your image using artificial intelligence into either an on-screen page or a printable page for kids to color.
Instead of requiring a tedious registration process, the app will walk you through customization options the first time you start building. Here, you will be asked to select the preferred app icon and check the various categories that your child likes. You can also choose whether you want to let the kids color the photo as a printable page or on the screen (ideal when the kids are bored, but you don’t want them absorbed in a TV show or game).
You can try a creative AI project to get a feel for the application. After that, it’s either $4.99 per week or $49.99 per year to keep creating new photos. The weekly option allows 25 pages per week and the annual option provides 500 pages per year. The option to purchase or access settings is blocked from young children by a pop-up that requires the parent’s year of birth.
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In short tests, the app worked as promised and the build time was short, allowing you to quickly go from idea to printed art, ready for coloring, cutting out or whatever else your child wants to do.
Splat is one of several experiments using genetic artificial intelligence to inspire children’s creativity and imagination in new ways. Another, Stickerbox, offers AI-generated printed stickers for coloring, while Casio also launched a fluffy robotic pet called Moflin that uses AI to develop its personality over time.
