Watch Researchers Animate Static Images Using Mesmerizing Machine Learning

Animation is beautiful, but creating moving pictures is incredibly labor intensive. The visual and arts departments who worked on the movie Moana alone numbered close to 300 people, according to the credit listings on IMBD. But a new process developed by researchers at Princeton has the potential to drastically simplify some parts of the process, with mesmerizing results. The tool basically lets users choose a part of a static image that they want to be animated, raindrops in a storm scene, for example, or steam particles moving through a combustion engine. The user then manipulates that part of their image to specify how fast they want the animation to move, at which point an algorithm takes over and extrapolates their instructions to all the other similar objects in the picture.