Machine learning is bringing old photos to life.

What’s new: A new service from genealogy company MyHeritage lets users animate their ancestors’ portraits, making them smile, blink, and turn their heads.
How it works: A MyHeritage account is required to use the service, called Deep Nostalgia. A free account allows users to animate five images, while paying customers can animate an unlimited number.

Deep Nostalgia accepts an uploaded photo and boosts its resolution.
It passes the photo to D-ID Live Portrait, which modifies its pixels to match motions in a pre-recorded video.
The service offers several videos in which a person turns their head, blinks, and smiles. Users can choose one or apply one selected automatically to suit the uploaded face’s orientation.

Behind the news: This is just the latest way AI is helping amateur archivists bring the past to life.

MyHeritage also licenses DeOldify, a system that uses deep learning to colorize black-and-white photos.
Denis Shiryaev, a researcher who uses neural networks to colorize archival video footage as previously featured in The Batch, brought his technology to the market via a company called Neural Love.

Why it matters: Seeing your ancestors come alive, even for a few seconds, is a powerful emotional experience — and possibly a lucrative market niche.

We’re thinking: We look forward to a day when our great-grandkids can turn our cell phone videos into haptic holographic projections.

MyHeritage

Make Your Ancestors Smile

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