Artificial intelligence shows what animated characters like Peter Pan, Ariel and more would look like in real life

The Brazilian artist, Hidreley Diao, surprises on Instagram because with the help of an artificial intelligence-based system, he shares images of what different fictional characters would look like, historical or works of art if they were alive.

In the post the phrase “What if... was real?” , that is, “What if... it were real?”

In this way, it invites readers to play with their imagination. His first creation came from the hand of the Statue of Liberty. To “bring to life” this monument, he used Photoshop and FaceApp, a popular application that allows you to edit photos in a few seconds to add effects, see what a person's face would look like if they were older, if they were younger, and much more.

“The first thing to do was to find a similar real image. Since I couldn't find it in any image bank, I used my girlfriend's face to give life to the statue,” he said in dialogue with Newsweek.

The artist used the image of the statue and mixed it with that of his girlfriend. This is how he obtained the result seen in his publications. “What takes the longest is to find an image that resembles the historical character. I spend hours in image banks until I get it. I always say that finding the perfect image to be the basis of art takes much longer than making art,” he analyzed.

That work was the starting point for a work that continues to surprise. Recently, the artist humanized three members of the Madrigal Family, protagonists of the film Encanto, by Walt Disney Pictures.

On his Instagram you can enjoy the personification of historical figures such as Alexander the Great, Van Gogh and George Washington, among many other options.

The Deep Nostalgia site allows you to animate old photos in just seconds. This is a service offered by the online genealogy company MyHeritage. For this, the company obtained a license for photo animation technology from D-ID, a company specializing in the reconstruction of video using deep learning.

The site incorporated this technology to animate faces in photographs and create realistic, high-quality video images. The Deep Nostalgia feature uses several model videos prepared for this purpose. Each model video consists of a fixed sequence of movements and gestures. The model clip guides the movements in the animation so that you can see the faces of ancestors turning their heads, blinking and smiling, as explained on the official website.

This tool is free to access, just log in to the site, create an account or profile and upload the image you want to animate. To apply the animation, the photo is required to be in high resolution. As old images often lack definition, what the system does in the first place is to repair the image by increasing the resolution and focusing the photos. Once this is done, the animated video is produced.

The system works on both color and black and white images and takes just 10 to 20 seconds to create the animation. Animated photos have a motion icon in the lower left margin to differentiate it from the original photo.

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