Deep Nostalgia: Learn how to give movement to old photos

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Screenshot of one of the examples used by Deep Nostalgia.

As much as a picture is worth a thousand words, a video can often provide more connection to the event than static photography. It’s something MyHeritage is well aware of in its new tool called “Deep nostalgia”. It is an artificial intelligence that converts photos from the past into video in an incredible way to guide the user through nostalgia.

The tool, as we see in Genbeta, provides a similar result to Apple’s Live Photos. That is, it shows short videos of a few seconds before the photo is taken. In this case, the video is actually generated by artificial intelligence and it’s not exactly what happened, but the realism of it is, of course, astonishing.

The idea behind it? Recreate the moments before the photo was taken, when the protagonists of the photo prepare to pose. To do this, artificial intelligence makes the subjects of the photo blink, look at different places, move their heads and smile.

According to MyHeritage, the process is fully automated. After the photos are uploaded to the tool’s website, they are analyzed to understand the subject’s orientation, the depth of the image, and the main elements and points of the face. Then choose one of the previously prepared guide videos of real people posing and apply the movements to the image.

The results shown by MyHeritage are without a doubt surprising, disturbing and realistic at the same time. It incredibly maintains the style of the photography and doesn’t distort the elements. Your only two limitations at the moment are that you can only animate the head and one person per photo.

Animate old photos with deep nostalgia

The new MyHeritage tool, while part of their services, offers a free version. In the free version, it is possible to animate a total of five free photos. To animate more photos, you have to pay for a subscription to the service. MyHeritage’s requirement to use Deep Nostalgia is to sign up for a free account.

To do this, all we need to do is go to the MyHeritage website and upload a photo to the service. The web app automatically analyzes the image and returns a video with the person’s face animated. Uploading old, black and white photos is preferred, the AI ​​is trained for that.

“Reanimating” people from the past through deepfakes is not a completely new thing, we saw it recently in a Cruzcampo campaign with Lola Flores. In fact, it is already common in the film industry. Some even use it to speak in different languages.

(Reprinted from Xataka)

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