Show HN: Color characters then see them dance on screen (not AI)

2 points

a year ago

I built a simple web app for my kids to color a character template, then see their creations dance on a screen (almost instantly). It was inspired by the Crayola Experience in Dallas.

I first built it as a weekend project for my daughter's Halloween party at school. Then my son asked to do it at his Valentines party. Then a friend asked me to run it at their STEAM party.

The code is a bit of a dumpster file - hacked together in a few weekends. Wish I could say it was vibe coded, but nope. I'm just that bad at animation stuff.

Tech stack: NodeJS, ThreeJS for animation, QR code scanning (zxing-wasm) for template detection/alignment, and Adobe Mixamo for the dance animation.

Anyways, I wanted to share in case someone would like to use it for their kids. It's got readme instructions if you want to customize the characters and background.

Code is MIT licensed and available at: https://github.com/bendytree/dancing-characters