Russian technology adds Van Gogh swirls to your photos

Ever felt like adding some Van Gogh-style swirls to your photos? Now you can. A Russian project called Ostagram allows Internet users to combine photos and works of art to create fantastical images that wouldn’t be out of place in the world of Alice in Wonderland or in a sci-fi space opera.

The Ostagram project, created by user Sergey Morugin, is a web service that uses a computer algorithm to combine the content of one image with the style of another image using convolutional neural networks. This means you can get a photo of your dog to look like a Monet painting, if you pick the dog pic as the source for content, and the Monet artwork as a source for style.