It’s hard to feel connected to someone who has gone through a static photo. That’s what a company called it MyHeritage Who offers automatic AI-based photo enhancements now offers a new service that can encourage people with old photos by creating a short video that it seems to have been recorded while posing and preparing the portrait.
He called Deep nostalgia, the resulting videos are reminiscent of the Live Photos feature on iOS and iPadOS, where several seconds of video are recorded and saved before and after you press the camera app shutter. But where you want to use Live Photos to find the perfect frame and frame that may have been missed the exact moment the shutter was pressed, Deep Nostalgia intends to bring still life to life, even those which are not captured on a modern smartphone.
The conversion process is fully automated. Users simply need to upload a photo through the MyHeritage website, where it is first refined and enhanced to not only improve the quality of the final animation, but also to facilitate the deep learning algorithm (created by a company called D-ID) do your thing. The orientation of the person in the photo is analyzed to determine the direction of their head and eyes, and then a video of the matching driver is selected — a modern recording of a face making movements as if posing for take a photo— to guide how the photo is animated.
G / O Media may receive a commission
The results are really realistic and manage to preserve the aesthetics of the original plan to help sell the engraving effect of this video when the actual photo was captured. However, deep nostalgia has some limitations. In a multi-subject photo, users are asked to select only one person they want to see animated because the tool, at least in its current form, cannot bring the entire photograph to life. The animations are also limited to the subject’s head and neck. If it’s a shot of them playing tennis, you won’t see them swinging at the ball.
He MyHeritage website requires users to register before they can use Deep Nostalgia. But once you do that, you can animate up to five different photos for free. Then you will have to pay a subscription to bring other friends and family back to life. Is it a little creepy? Yes, but at the same time, it’s another fascinating application of AI and deep learning that feels straight out of science fiction. And while the service is limited today, it won’t be long before AI can bring a whole photo to life, so a static moment at grandparents ’wedding could easily turn into another family video.