![]() And it goes far Beyond AI and deep learning: Psychics Services is a $2.2 billion dollar industry that has been around in one form or another basically for as long as people have been dying. As virtual reality hype was exploding in 2015, for example, Project Elysium promised to reconnect people with their dead relatives via personalized VR experiences, though the project never progressed beyond an early prototype. While the technology behind Deep Nostalgia is novel, the idea behind it isn’t. Ultimately, Deep Nostalgia is a way for MyHeritage to advertise its DNA genealogy services by using a novel technology to tug at people's heartstrings, and it has worked tremendously. Zucker sees technologies like Deep Nostalgia as new tools in the long evolution of cultural practices around connecting to and memorializing those we’ve lost, practices that, at their core, blur the lines between the categories of past and present, alive and dead, anguish and catharsis. And that's different from a feeling of reconnecting with someone who is gone, maybe through a dream, or through encountering something they wrote, or just reminiscing.” Hauntings imply that something is coming to visit that you don't necessarily want. “Think about ghost stories: why are ghosts troublesome? Because they become present when they’re supposed to be in the past, not engaging with us now,” Zucker said. Instead, that duality is something more endemic to mourning itself. The uncanny valley only explains so much. "I don't think that the answer lies so much in that it's digital.” said Yale University anthropologist Eve Zucker, who studies the intersection of digital media and the memorialization of mass violence. So why does Deep Nostalgia feel simultaneously like a mutilation and an animation? How can those feelings of creepiness and catharsis coexist? ![]() ![]() Quinn is reluctant to animate his late mother Richards was hesitant to share it with her niece a pose stretched too far shocked Avern out of the consolation he felt at first and pretty much all coverage of Deep Nostalgia-even its own website-acknowledges the tool’s creep-factor. Neither its algorithm nor the catharsis Deep Nostalgia provides are perfect. Thirty seconds later, with a lump in her throat, she asked me to animate their wedding photo. I called her up, explained the concept, and sent her the video. I hadn’t seen him move for so long,” Avern said.īefore writing this, I used the app on an old picture of my mom’s parents, who I’ve never met. ![]() Avern has spent the last few years trying to learn the details he didn’t think to pay attention to while his dad was still around, and Deep Nostalgia “was a ‘butterflies’ moment.” “And I fell in love with it.”Ĭhris Avern animated his father, Reginald, whom he lost to a heart attack in 2009. “I felt like this would be a way to see him come alive again,” Richards said. Uchenna Richards used the app to bring back her brother, Robert, whom she remembers for his “huge beautiful smile” and for how much he adored his kids. Whatever it was, to Quinn, and others who have used the app not to connect to history, but to those they’ve personally lost, Deep Nostalgia presents a predicament that is as old as death itself: the desire to connect with the dead is natural, yet actually doing so can often feel anything but. That motion, though technically robotic, humanized him “I found a connection with this person-is it a person? With this thing, this algorithm-that I had never felt before.” “So to suddenly see him in a nuanced and human way made me feel like I was there, looking at him.” Beyond one grainy Super 8 home movie, the Deep Nostalgia animation gave Quinn his first-ever look at his dad in motion. “My dad had always existed in my mind as this ethereal figure” Quinn said. He died from acute Leukemia in 1978, two months before Russell was born. If (slot) slot.addService(googletag.Russel Quinn uploaded a picture of his dad, Richard. (function (a, d, o, r, i, c, u, p, w, m) MyHeritage's 'Deep Nostalgia' brings old family photos to life - The Jerusalem Post
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