Document Scanner Animation in React Native

Enhancing UI/UX for document scanner with animations

Many applications feature document scanners with standard, fixed frames, but these can often feel static and unengaging. Today, we’ll enhance a simple document scanner by creating a more interactive and attractive user interface using animations.

While creating, we will use some of the hooks and methods from the react-native-reanimated package and generate some animation for the document scanner.

Installation

To get started, first create a basic app. Then, add the animation package.

yarn add react-native-reanimated

Note: Ensure you add the following to your Babel config to avoid issues later:

plugins: [
…
'react-native-reanimated/plugin',
],

For more details on configuration and setup, refer to the official documentation.

Implementation

We will implement the following components for our document scanner:

• Background layer for camera
• Capture area frame
• Capture Indicator

To begin, we’ll define constants in a separate file for easy configuration and maintenance.

Background layer for camera

We will create a semi-transparent view that animates from the center — it will create an opening for a fully transparent view that fits the frame. We’ll then animate the width and height based on the duration.

First, we create the top and bottom shades without any animation. Then, we apply the animation to the middle part as shown below:

Preview :

Background layer for camera

Capture area frame

There are multiple ways to create the frame. To achieve the desired result, we can use an image or create one side corner and rotate it from different angles.

Once the frame is set, we apply an animation to make it slightly zoom in and out by adjusting the margin around the container.

Preview:

Capture area frame

Capture Indicator

Next, we add a moving vertical line to our scanner animation. We can achieve this by applying a box offset with repeat animation, which will move the line from top to bottom continuously.

After implementing all the steps, we merge the individual components to achieve the final output:

Final Output:

Final output

A full demo is available on the GitHub repo. 🚀

Animation Catalog

The examples above show how animation can create a more exciting user experience. Similar to this, there are numerous other exciting animations available in a single package, for example:

• Parallax header with and without tabs
• Gradient progress bar
• Animated buttons, checkboxes, cards, etc, and many more.

Explore them all at react-native-animation-catalog.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we utilized react-native-reanimated to create a more engaging document scanner, moving beyond static frames.

Though, there is always room for further enhancements, such as:

• Detection process animations
• Camera loading time animations
• Result loading animations
• Failure animations

Stay tuned to the Simform Engineering blog for more updates on the latest tools and technologies.

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