Researchers at Google, Facebook, and the University of Washington have devised “a fully automatic method for converting a still image into a realistic animated looping video.”
We target scenes with continuous fluid motion, such as flowing water and billowing smoke. Our method relies on the observation that this type of natural motion can be convincingly reproduced from a static Eulerian motion description… We propose a novel video looping technique that flows features both forward and backward in time and then blends the results.
The results are rather amazing.
i seem to remember a long time back that there was a technique or plug in for photoshop that made animated gif files from a single frame or from a start and end frame. This of course is far more refined. Amazing what smart minds can do and that we can no longer believe anything we see or hear recorded.