Google has taken its 360-degree Street View cameras into some of the most famous and acclaimed galleries, to open the world’s art collection to the internet. ARTKABINETT social network for fine art collectors offers the link below to this online museum experience.
From the Tate Britain in London to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Google Art Project lets you browse 385 rooms in 17 galleries, and see more than 1,000 works by 486 artists.
Each of the galleries has selected one piece of artwork to be photographed in staggeringly high resolution, with each of the 17 images containing around 7 billion pixels.
Zoom in close enough, and you can see individual brushstrokes, hairline cracks in the canvas and microscopic details that are almost invisible to the naked eye — like tiny Latin messages scrawled on Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Merchant Georg Gisze, pictured above, in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.
“It’s our first step toward making great art more accessible,” said project lead Amit Sood (shown above) on the Google blog, “and we hope to add more museums and works of art in time.”
The effect was captured in pretty much the same way that Google has used to map out most of the world, including Antarctica, Whistler Mountain, Champs-Élysées and Stonehenge.
But instead of cars (or snowmobiles), the team used the Street View tricycle for open spaces, and a more-compact vertical trolley for the halls.
The pushcart — “lovingly dubbed Trolley,” writes Google’s Jonathan Siegel — features a panoramic camera, lasers to calculate distances to the walls, motion sensors to track the rig’s position, a hard drive to store the huge images and a laptop to operate it.
Interestingly enough, while Google has set up a bespoke website for the art gallery tours, you can also leap into buildings from Google Maps itself.
Some museums, such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, let you drop Pegman (the Google Street View icon) directly onto a map of the gallery, while others let you enter from the street with a new, double-arrow icon.
Google didn't do this project on its own. Rather, it partnered with a company called Schematic, which helped integrate many of the technologies that together form Google Art Project, and which took on a lot of the heavy lifting in dealing with the various museums.
Gone are the days of jet-setting to galleries in Manhattan, Florence, London, or Madrid. As of yesterday, all you need to become a museum maven is an Internet connection. The roster includes The Uffizi, the Tate Britain, The Met, MoMA, and the Van Gogh Museum.
The Google Art Project collection, as a whole, consists of 1,000 works of art by more than 400 artists, and this is only the beginning. Google hopes to add more museums and works of art to its virtual dossier soon.
Stroll through the aisles of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and study the renowned use of light and shadow in Rembrandt's Night Watch on my lunch break.
The team behind Street View, and their brand-new device, the "trolley," enable these 360-degree virtual tours of museum interiors, and each museum features one work of art in super high-resolution by using gigapixel photocapturing technology.
