Deep Nostalgia brings historical images to life using AI

Deep Nostalgia is a new AI-powered device from MyHeritage’s online family tree service, which adds face animations like smiles, nods, blinks, and head tilts to take still photos. Using the website or mobile app, users can choose from a set of pre-recorded animations that can be moved to their own photos. The service warns that its technology should not be used to try to create “deepfake” videos of public figures or anyone else without their permission. You can crop faces from group photos but you still can’t animate several people in one frame. A watermark will be applied to show that such animations are artistically generated.

Users can sign up for a free account to use Deep Nostalgia, but will be limited to a small number of animations unless they purchase a membership plan. Animations can be easily posted to social media and exported as MP4 files. The technology has gone viral on social media, with people posting examples of “Harry Potter” animated pictures. In India, Keerthik Sasidharan, author of The Dharma Forest, is among the users who have posted animations of Indian freedom fighters and other historical figures. Here are some of the most interesting photos they submitted.

A kind of surreal for photographing the particularly inspiring Bhagat Singh – a revolutionary voice in India in the 1920s, hung by the British in 1931, at the age of 24 – it ran through the Heritage AI algorithm , and see it repeated. pic.twitter.com/CfC0Gu6Gxk

– Keerthik Sasidharan (@ KS1729) February 28, 2021

Swami Vivekananda might have lamented such algorithmic attempts to recreate images, but as a major believer in the powers of science to advance substantive aspects of human life, he would have wanted to understand in detail -information about how it works. pic.twitter.com/3zFu9suGar

– Keerthik Sasidharan (@ KS1729) February 28, 2021

It was hard to find a quality picture of Lokmanya Tilak, but this worked. Tilak desperately deserves a new reassessment as one of the founders of India’s modern mind. Reformer & revivalist traditions, believing in the power of the mass media before most Indians read. pic.twitter.com/M93KWkR6bc

– Keerthik Sasidharan (@ KS1729) February 28, 2021

Munshi Premchand, half saddened, by the new inventions that have emerged 80 years after his death. If he were alive, he might have used some of it – perhaps, even a novel about a farmer who wants to buy a computer for a girl – in his great writing. pic.twitter.com/dNtm4Dh7CB

– Keerthik Sasidharan (@ KS1729) February 28, 2021

S Ramanujan. It seems to be trying to make sense of some equations on a blackboard. pic.twitter.com/grxawuI3Ag

– Ramnath (@rmnth) February 28, 2021