Camera technology has advanced a lot, and almost every one of us has one. IPhone users are louder in a feature offered by their mobile phone camera when taking a photo (iOS Live Photo), which shoots several photos in a row and makes the photo look like a video, more precisely takes a moving picture. This is intended as an option to enable users to choose the best photo from a series of shots.
However, the dilemma is how to make an old picture look like a moving picture?
The company MyHeritage, recently launched a web service called Deep Nostalgia, through which you can upload an old photo, and the service turns it into a moving image (.gif), to make it look like the character in the picture moves until it takes the right position to be photographed.
Their purpose was to enable the uploading of photos of loved ones who have already died, and then to turn those static photos into moving photos.
While the "Live Photo" option is supposed to find the best pose that may have been lost in the exact second shot, "Deep Nostalgia" aims to bring to life old photos, even those that were not shot by a modern camera.
MyHeritage has achieved all this through Artificial Intelligence (AI), which in this case uses a technology for deep learning - created and licensed by the company "D-ID" - to animate the movement of the face and of the eyes of the characters in static photography.
This whole process is automated. It is enough for the user to upload a photo through the MyHeritage website, where the quality of the photo is initially improved not only to improve the quality of the final animation, but also to facilitate the work of the deep learning algorithm.
To prove this, all you have to do is register on the MyHeritage platform, entering your first and last name, year of birth, and e-mail address. So you can turn up to five old static photos into motion pictures (.gif) for free, and make it look like the characters are posing in front of the camera before being photographed. After that you can pay a price for monthly registration and exceed the limit of 5 photos.
However, "Deep Nostalgia" has its limits. If there are two or more people in a picture, for example, you can apply these animations to only one character. Also animations are limited to the head and neck only. If the subjects are walking or playing, you will not be able to move them. However this can only be temporary until one day you can turn an entire photo into a video.
