Old photos of Bhagat Singh, Swami Vivekananda and other important figures in history have been brought back to life using a newly-launched AI technology. 'Deep Nostalgia' is an artificial intelligence tool, released by genealogy website MyHeritage, that can add facial animations to still photographs. "This feature truly takes 'bring your old family photos to life' to a whole new level," MyHeritage wrote in a blog post.
After it was launched four days ago, photos animated using Deep Nostalgia went viral on social media in a big way. According to The Verge, Deep Nostalgia became one of the top trends on Twitter over the weekend. While many Twitter users used the tool to add facial expressions and animations like blinking and smiling to photographs of loved ones, others applied the technology to historic pics.
One Twitter user brought pics of Bhagat Singh, Swami Vivekananda, Munshi Premchand and others to life using Deep Nostalgia. "Kind of surreal to take a photo of the singularly inspiring Bhagat Singh -- a revolutionary voice in 1920s India, who was hung by the British in 1931, at the age of 24 -- run it through the Heritage AI algorithm, and see him reanimated," wrote Keerthik Sasidharan while sharing the first in a series of animations he created.
Kind of surreal to take a photo of the singularly inspiring Bhagat Singh -- a revolutionary voice in 1920s India, who was hung by the British in 1931, at the age of 24 -- run it through the Heritage AI algorithm, and see him reanimated. pic.twitter.com/CfC0Gu6Gxk
— Keerthik Sasidharan (@KS1729) February 28, 2021
He also animated pics of Swami Vivekananda, Lokmanya Tilak, celebrated author Munshi Premchand and Kasturba Gandhi.
It was hard to find a quality photo of Lokmanya Tilak, but this worked. Tilak urgently deserve a new reappraisal as one of the founding fathers of the modern Indian mind. A reformist & revivalist of traditions, a believer in the power of mass media before most Indians could read. pic.twitter.com/M93KWkR6bc
— Keerthik Sasidharan (@KS1729) February 28, 2021
Munshi Premchand, half bemused, at the newfangled inventions that have come up 80 years after his death. If he were alive, he would probably have used some of it--perhaps, even a novel about of a farmer who wants to buy a computer for his daughter--in his vast oeuvre of writings. pic.twitter.com/dNtm4Dh7CB
— Keerthik Sasidharan (@KS1729) February 28, 2021
The videos have gone viral on the microblogging platform, collecting more than half a million views and hundreds of amazed responses.
Absolutely brilliant .
— Suniel Shetty (@SunielVShetty) February 28, 2021
I find the Bhagat Singh deeply moving and emotional. Till now he was always someone I admired intellectually for his idealism and courage but seeing him and the rest humanized hit me hard how brave they (him Azad, etc) were and much we owe him and his contemporaries.
— Koi Banda (@koibanda) February 28, 2021
People can animate still photographs by signing up for a free account on the MyHeritage website. They will be limited to a small number of animations unless they purchase a subscription plan.
"Deep Nostalgia uses deep learning algorithms, to produce remarkable results. You can animate any of the faces in your photos to see them move, blink, and smile," MyHeritage explained in a blog post.
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