It’s hard to feel connected to someone who has gone through a still photo. So a company called My legacy who offers automatic photo enhancements with AI now offers a new service that can animate people in old photos by creating a short video that it appears to have been recorded as they posed and prepared for the portrait.
Called Deep nostalgia, the resulting videos are reminiscent of the Live Photos feature on iOS and iPadOS where a few seconds of the video are recorded and saved before and after the camera application is pressed. But where Live Photos is meant to be used to find the perfect photos and shots that could have been missed exactly the second the shutter was pressed, Deep Nostalgia is meant to bring still life to life, even those that don’t. were captured with a modern smartphone.
The conversion process is completely automated. Users simply need to upload a photo through the MyHeritage site, where it is first sharpened and enhanced to improve not only the quality of the final animation, but also to facilitate the deep learning algorithm (created by a company called MADE) to do their job. The orientation of the person in the photo is analyzed to determine the direction of the head and eyes and then a corresponding video guide is selected – a modern recording of a face moving as if posing for a photo – to guide how it is animated photo.
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The results are extremely realistic and manage to keep the aesthetics of the original photo to help sell the effect of recording this video when the real photo was captured. But 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 photo to life. Animations are also limited to the subject’s head and neck. If it’s a shot of them playing tennis, you won’t see how it binds to the ball.
MyHeritage site requires users to register before they can use Deep Nostalgia. But once you’re done, you can animate up to five different photos for free. After that, you will have to pay for a subscription to bring other friends and family back to life. Is it a little creepy? Yes, but at the same time, it is another fascinating application of AI and deep learning that is felt directly from science fiction. And while the service is limited today, it won’t be long before AI is able to bring an entire photo to life, so a static moment at grandparents’ wedding could easily become another family video.