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.
He also animated pics of Swami Vivekananda, Lokmanya Tilak, celebrated author Munshi Premchand and Kasturba Gandhi.
The videos have gone viral on the microblogging platform, collecting more than half a million views and hundreds of amazed responses.
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.
