THE EFFECT is somewhat reminiscent of Apple’s Live Photos. Except that it is the result of an artificial intelligence tool capable of doing a simple but surprising thing, and in some ways disturbing: to restore life to old photos, animating them. The service, cleverly dubbed Deep Nostalgia, was launched by the online genealogy research company MyHeritage almost as a parallel tool. Which, however, in recent days has produced a nice phenomenon on social media, in particular on Twitter, with the sharing of gifs produced as a result of processing.
The faces of relatives when they were young, but above all of some family member or friend who is no longer there, manage with Deep Nostalgia to come to life with a slight smile, a blink of the eyelids, a half movement of the head that adds a shiver of ) reality, a dip into the reconstructed past that those images usually retain in a static way. Basically, an artificial intelligence mechanism, developed together with the Israeli startup D-ID, is applied to the uploaded images – indeed, to the image since it can be provided one at a time, which obviously is designed to be exploited especially with the old ones. family shots. Which immortalize those people for whom we do not have recordings, videos or clips because they were born and disappeared in the era for smartphones, when even a film was rare.
In some way it is a kind of homemade deepfake that instead of superimposing the face of one person on that of another, sets the vintage shot in motion, giving us an animated gif. For some disturbing and even unpleasant, for others brilliant and in some ways magical. In fact, the platform uses pre-recorded videos by the company’s employees as a basic model of facial movements to which the “skin” provided by the photo is applied, choosing in a matter of seconds the most suitable ones to use with the image provided by the user. MyHeritage, which carries out genealogical research starting from DNA samples starting from a few tens of euros, is also available in Italian. Just take a buccal swab, send the kit back to the platform and wait for the results to obtain a series of information, from genetic matches to relatives never known and only found in this way. The platform was purchased in recent days by the US private equity fund Francisco Partners for several hundred million dollars.
Launched a few days ago, Deep Nostalgia is free for a trial period of two weeks and a maximum of five uploads: “Seeing the faces of our ancestors come to life in a video simulation allows us to imagine them as they existed in reality and offers a new way to connect to our family history “he explained in a statement Gilad Japhet, founder and CEO of MyHeritage. Users are obviously advised not to upload photos of living people, because the mechanism is designed to restore a flash of movement to old memories (someone, on Twitter, even thought of using photos of ancient statues, famous paintings such as the Mona Lisa and shots or portraits of celebrities, from Charles Darwin a Leonardo da Vinci). The voice is not involved, so there are no audio tracks, and the images – they assure from the Israeli platform – are deleted immediately after processing. Obviously it is possible to animate only the faces of the immortalized subjects, not whole figures.
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