Colorbo: Envisioned Mandala Coloring through Human-AI Collaboration

Abstract

Mandala coloring is popular among many people, from children to adults, and many studies have revealed its benefits in mental wellbeing. However, our preliminary study results reveal difficulties in mandala coloring tasks, such as selecting harmonious colors/areas and envisioning how each selection affects the final output. This paper presents Colorbo, an interactive system based on human-AI collaboration to envision mandala coloring. Colorbo and its user colorize a mandala individually by watching each other work. The user shows a colored mandala in progress, and Colorbo fills in the remaining areas by analyzing the patterns and color combinations of the user's image. Colorbo then projects the complete mandala onto the paper the user is colorizing, and the user continues coloring by envisioning the outcome based on images from Colorbo. We conducted a within-subject study to investigate the effectiveness of Colorbo. Our quantitative and qualitative analysis results show the positive experiences of the participants, concerns regarding the coloring behavior with Colorbo, and their preferred projection method for envisioning a mandala. Finally, based on the findings, we discuss the design implications for human-AI collaboration in the area of art.