What if you could take the grunt work out of animation? With the aid of a small motion sensor, a team of Carnegie Mellon researchers have done just that, enabling any still image to be instantly animated with the flick of the wrist.

In a video uploaded by Ali Momeni, a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Art Fabrication, Momeni described Dranimate, his team's animation process. A program defines the edges of a hand-drawn image, and the image is converted to a mesh composed of tetrahedral elements. Then, using a Leap motion sensor, a user maps their fingers to the articulated appendages of the drawing. If the drawing was of a humanoid, for example, the user could map their fingers to the arms, legs and head of the drawing.

What results is akin to a digital marionette, where each finger's location and movement above the sensor is converted to the x-axis and y-axis coordinates of an associated extension of the drawing. A user can twiddle their fingers to exact an intuitive level of control over the drawing.