Fill in coloring books in far less time with an incredible gadget that will save MILLIONS of hours of labor per year!

Background:

Every year, tens of millions of coloring books are sold to children and adults alike.

The Issue:

Filling in a coloring book can be quite a time-consuming process. Even with frantic scribbling and thick markers, it’s a slow process to fully color even a single page in a coloring book (Figure 1).

Fig. 1: Colored pencils (seen above) and crayons are the most popular artistic tools used for filling in a coloring book. But both are quite slow and require substantial non-coloring “dead time“ as the color-er switches between various pencils/crayons/markers.

Proposal:

Thanks to modern technology, we can make a tool that will vastly improve coloring efficiency. A combination of computer vision (i.e., a camera) and machine learning can allow a computer to quickly determine a reasonable set of colors for a coloring book.

By combining this information with modern mechanical engineering, we can create a device (Figure 2) that will quickly fill in the coloring book as the user slowly moves it across the page.

Fig. 2: The camera (A) can determine (with 99% accuracy) what color to use to fill in each region of the coloring book. The user need only hold the auto-filler at the handle (B) and slowly sweep it across the page while markers are automatically extended and retracted (C) to fill in the page in record time!

With this sort of technology, coloring time can probably be reduced by 90% or more.

Conclusion:

If we (conservatively) estimate that it takes 2 hours to fill in the average coloring book, and that 10 million coloring books are filled-in per year in the United States alone, then this device can save 36 million hours of labor annually—in just one country!

It’s possible that future advancements in technology may even make it possible for coloring books to be entirely filled in by machine before shipping it to the user.

PROS: Saves an enormous amount of labor. Should reduce the number of coloring-book-related repetitive stress injuries.

CONS: None!